Intact and impaired mechanisms of action understanding in autism

Typically developing children understand and predict others' behavior by extracting and processing relevant information such as the logic of their actions within the situational constraints and the intentions conveyed by their gaze direction and emotional expressions. Children with autism have difficulties understanding and predicting others' actions. With the use of eye tracking and behavioral measures, we investigated action understanding mechanisms used by 18 children with autism and a well-matched group of 18 typically developing children. Results showed that children with autism (a) consider situational constraints in order to understand the logic of an agent's action and (b) show typical usage of the agent's emotional expressions to infer his or her intentions. We found (c) subtle atypicalities in the way children with autism respond to an agent's direct gaze and (d) marked impairments in their ability to attend to and interpret referential cues such as a head turn for understanding an agent's intentions.     

The divided female--motherhood and public culture

The author compares "individual" motherhood, common in countries like Switzerland and the Federal Republic, with the "social" motherhood characteristic of a Mayan peasant culture in Yucatan. She discusses various psychoanalytic conceptions of motherhood, for instance, Freud's and Winnicott's. She argues that the ideological concept of the missing penis actually expresses the very real cultural deficiency of women. The retention of such ideological concepts prevents the actual conditions from being acknowledged in psychoanalytic theory. This, in turn, blocks the change in paradigm necessary for an adequate metatheoretical handling of gender differences.     

Elevated outcome-anticipation and outcome-evaluation ERPs associated with a greater preference for larger-but-delayed rewards

Although waiting for a reward reduces or discounts its value, some people have a stronger tendency to wait for larger rewards and forgo smaller-but-immediate rewards. This ability to delay gratification is captured by individual differences in so-called intertemporal choices in which individuals are asked to choose between larger-but-delayed versus smaller-but-immediate rewards. The current study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether enhancement in two neurocognitive processes, outcome anticipation and outcome evaluation, modulate individual variability in intertemporal responses. After completing a behavioral intertemporal choice task, 34 participants performed an ERP gambling task. From this ERP task, we separately examined individual differences in outcome anticipation (stimulus-preceding negativity; SPN), early outcome valuation (feedback-related negativity; FRN), and late outcome evaluation (P3). We observed that both elevated outcome-anticipation (SPN) and late outcome-evaluation (P3) neural processes predicted a stronger preference toward larger-but-delayed rewards. No relationship was observed between intertemporal responses and early outcome evaluation (FRN), indicating that the relationship between outcome evaluation and intertemporal responses was specific to the late outcome-evaluation processing stream. Moreover, multiple regression analyses indicated that the SPN and P3 independently modulate individual differences in intertemporal responses, suggesting separate mechanisms underlie the relationship between these two neurocognitive processes and intertemporal responses. Accordingly, we identify two potential neurocognitive modulators of individual variability in intertemporal responses. We discuss the mechanisms underlying these modulators in terms of anticipation-related processing (SPN) and a saliency bias toward gain (compared to loss) outcomes (P3).     

Evidence of perspective-taking constraints in children's on-line reference resolution

Young children's communication has often been characterized as egocentric. Some researchers claim that the processing of language involves an initial stage that relies on egocentric heuristics, even in adults. Such an account, combined with general developmental difficulties with late-stage processes, could provide an explanation for much of children's egocentric communication. However, the experimental data reported in this article do not support such an account: In an elicited-production task, 5- to 6-year-old children were found to be sensitive to their partner's perspective. Moreover, in an on-line comprehension task, they showed sensitivity to common-ground information from the initial stages of language processing. We propose that mutual knowledge is not distinct from other knowledge relevant for language processing, and exerts early effects on processing in proportion to its salience and reliability.     

Women and Natural Hierarchy in Aristotle

In this paper, I examine the frame of reference in Aristotle's Politics within which he makes claims about women and their place in his conception of politics.     

What do children with autism attend to during imitation tasks?

Individuals with autism show a complex profile of differences in imitative ability, including a general deficit in precision of imitating another’s actions and special difficulty in imitating nonmeaningful gestures relative to meaningful actions on objects. Given that they also show atypical patterns of visual attention when observing social stimuli, we investigated whether possible differences in visual attention when observing an action to be imitated may contribute to imitative difficulties in autism in both nonmeaningful gestures and meaningful actions on objects. Results indicated that (a) a group of 18 high-functioning 8- to 15-year-olds with autistic disorder, in comparison with a matched group of 13 typically developing children, showed similar patterns of visual attention to the demonstrator’s action but decreased attention to his face when observing a model to be imitated; (b) nonmeaningful gestures and meaningful actions on objects triggered distinct visual attention patterns that did not differ between groups; (c) the autism group demonstrated reduced imitative precision for both types of imitation; and (d) duration of visual attention to the demonstrator’s action was related to imitation precision for nonmeaningful gestures in the autism group.