Using artificial life to teach evolutionary biology

This paper presents a pilot study on the use of artificial life software in an educational setting. Two groups of high school students received a standard lesson in evolutionary biology followed by a software session. The experimental group used the suite of artificial life software presented in this paper; the control group used a commercial multimedia hypertext. At the end of the software session both groups were asked to fill in a simple multiple-choice questionnaire testing the students knowledge of various aspects of evolutionary biology. The results show that the group using the artificial life software performed significantly better than the control group. We argue that the experimental group may learn more effectively because the artificial life makes it possible for students to perform experiments, a possibility not available to the control group.

Artificial organisms as tools for the development of psychological theory: Tolman’s lesson

In the 1930s and 1940s, Edward Tolman developed a psychological theory of spatial orientation in rats and humans. He expressed his theory as an automaton (the "schematic sowbug") or what today we would call an "artificial organism." With the technology of the day, he could not implement his model. Nonetheless, he used it to develop empirical predictions which tested with animals in the laboratory. This way of proceeding was in line with scientific practice dating back to Galileo. The way psychologists use artificial organisms in their work today breaks with this tradition. Modern "artificial organisms" are constructed a posteriori, working from experimental or ethological observations. As a result, researchers can use them to confirm a theoretical model or to simulate its operation. But they make no contribution to the actual building of models. In this paper, we try to return to Tolman's original strategy: implementing his theory of "vicarious trial and error" in a simulated robot, forecasting the robot's behavior and conducting experiments that verify or falsify these predictions.     

Empathy and emotion recognition in semantic dementia: A case report

Recent studies have demonstrated that patients suffering from frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) show impairments in empathy and emotional processing. In this study, we examined two different aspects of these abilities in a patient with semantic dementia (SD), a variant of FTLD. The first aspect was the assessment of the cognitive and emotional components of empathy through the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. The second was the naming and comprehension of emotions using the Ekman 60 Faces Test. The patient’s emotion word knowledge was spared and the emotional aspects of empathy preserved. Conversely, the patient performed below average for all of the basic emotions when an emotion word had to be matched with a picture. When picture-to-picture matching was tested, however, the patient was able to recognize happiness. This case is a good example of a dissociation of covert and overt emotional functioning in SD. Results are discussed in terms of the impaired empathic behavior and emotional functioning in FTLD.     

Encoding geometric and non-geometric information: a study with evolved agents

Vertebrate species use geometric information and non-geometric or featural cues to orient. Under some circumstances, when both geometric and non-geometric information are available, the geometric information overwhelms non-geometric cues (geometric primacy). In other cases, we observe the inverse tendency or the successful integration of both cues. In past years, modular explanations have been proposed for the geometric primacy: geometric and non-geometric information are processed separately, with the geometry module playing a dominant role. The modularity issue is related to the recent debate on the encoding of geometric information: is it innate or does it depend on environmental experience? In order to get insight into the mechanisms that cause the wide variety of behaviors observed in nature, we used Artificial Life experiments. We demonstrated that agents trained mainly with a single class of information oriented efficiently when they were exposed to one class of information (geometric or non-geometric). When they were tested in environments that contained both classes of information, they displayed a primacy for the information that they had experienced more during their training phase. Encoding and processing geometric and non-geometric information was run in a single cognitive neuro-representation. These findings represent a theoretical proof that the exposure frequency to different spatial information during a learning/adaptive history could produce agents with no modular neuro-cognitive systems that are able to process different types of spatial information and display various orientation behaviors (geometric primacy, non-geometric primacy, no primacy at all).     

Right hemisphere involvement in non-fluent primary progressive aphasia

We described a 56-years-old man with a diagnosis of "non-fluent primary progressive aphasia" (NfPPA). An accurate neuropsychological, neurological and neuroimaging evaluation was performed in order to assess clinical and behavioural features of the patient. From a neuropsychological point of view, the patient showed a typical cognitive profile of subjects affected by NfPPA: a prominent language deficit, associated with impairments in several cognitive domains after three years from the onset of the symptomatology. The most intriguing feature is that SPECT revealed hypoperfusion in the right frontal cortex, albeit the patient is right-handed. This unexpected finding shows that NfPPA may arise not only from cortical abnormalities in the language-dominant left hemisphere, but also from right hemisphere involvement in a right hander (crossed aphasia).