This article investigates the claims made in the dedicatory epistle to Girolamo Manfredi’s De homine to have effected an Italian translation of various earlier works. First published in 1474, the De homine is strongly dependent on the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, for which several translations into Latin were available by Manfredi’s time as well as the highly influential commentary by Pietro d’Abano. Focusing on one particular section of the De homine, on voice, this article offers an analysis of the various sources used (...) and of the extent to which Manfredi is indeed offering a translation or something different. This study concludes that Manfredi closely followed the translation by Bartolomeo da Messina and the commentary by Pietro d’Abano; it finds no clear evidence of his use of the translations by George of Trebizond or Theodore Gaza. Other sources used include especially Rhazes’ Ad Almansorem. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, the notion of culture-led regeneration entered the urban agenda of several European cities confronted with drastic economic changes due to losses in their industrial base. This paper critically addresses a major case in the City of Rome, indeed less affected by these phenomena. In here, the densely populated working-class districts of Ostiense and Testaccio along the Tiber River just outside the City Centre have become part for some years now of a culture-led regeneration program conveying a (...) brand new idea of “Knowledge City” deemed able to supplant the previous image of the “Factory City.”. (shrink)

The label ‘Translational Research’ (TR) has become ever more popular in the biomedical domain in recent years. It is usually presented as an attempt to bridge a supposed gap between knowledge produced at the lab bench and its use at the clinical bedside. This is claimed to help society harvest the benefits of its investments in scientific research. The rhetorical as well as moral force of the label TR obscure, however, that it is actually used in very different ways. In (...) this paper, we analyse the scientific discourse on TR, with the aim to disentangle and critically evaluate the different meanings of the label. We start with a brief reconstruction of the history of the concept. Subsequently, we unravel how the label is actually used in a sample of scientific publications on TR and examine the presuppositions implied by different views of TR. We argue that it is useful to distinguish different views of TR on the basis of three dimensions, related to (1) the construction of the ‘translational gap’; (2) the model of the translational process; and (3) the cause of the perceived translational gap. We conclude that the motive to make society benefit from its investments in biomedical science may be laudable, but that it is doubtful whether the dominant views of TR will contribute to this end. (shrink)

This book explores the different ways in which psychoanalysis has been connected to various fields of Italian culture, such as literary criticism, philosophy ...

The label ‘Translational Research’ (TR) has become ever more popular in the biomedical domain in recent years. It is usually presented as an attempt to bridge a supposed gap between knowledge produced at the lab bench and its use at the clinical bedside. This is claimed to help society harvest the benefits of its investments in scientific research. The rhetorical as well as moral force of the label TR obscure, however, that it is actually used in very different ways. In (...) this paper, we analyse the scientific discourse on TR, with the aim to disentangle and critically evaluate the different meanings of the label. We start with a brief reconstruction of the history of the concept. Subsequently, we unravel how the label is actually used in a sample of scientific publications on TR and examine the presuppositions implied by different views of TR. We argue that it is useful to distinguish different views of TR on the basis of three dimensions, related to (1) the construction of the ‘translational gap’; (2) the model of the translational process; and (3) the cause of the perceived translational gap. We conclude that the motive to make society benefit from its investments in biomedical science may be laudable, but that it is doubtful whether the dominant views of TR will contribute to this end. (shrink)

The question we raise in this paper is, whether patient involvement might be a beneficial way to help determine and achieve the aims of translational research and, if so, how to proceed. TR is said to ensure a more effective movement of basic scientific findings to relevant and useful clinical applications. In view of the fact that patients are supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of such translation and also have relevant knowledge based on their experience, listening to their voice (...) early on in the innovation process might very well increase the effectiveness of the translation. After explaining how the concept of TR emerged and what it entails, this paper shows through a literature review which arguments have been put forward to promote patient involvement in health care research in a more general sense. We examine whether, and if so how, these arguments are relevant for the discourse on TR and we identify pitfalls and dilemmas. Ultimately, we conclude that it may be worthwhile to experiment with patient involvement in TR but that the design of such involvement requires careful consideration. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 lockdown, individuals were forced to remain at home, hence severely limiting the interaction within environmental stimuli, reducing the cognitive load placed on spatial competences. The effects of the behavioral restriction on cognition have been little examined. The present study is aimed at analyzing the effects of lockdown on executive function prominently involved in adapting behavior to new environmental demands. We analyze non-verbal fluency abilities, as indirectly providing a measure of cognitive flexibility to react to spatial changes. Sixteen (...) students, evaluated before the start of the lockdown in a battery of psychological tasks exploring different cognitive domains, have been reassessed during lockdown. The assessment included the modified Five-Point Test to analyze non-verbal fluency abilities. At T2, the students were also administered the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. The restriction of behaviors following a lockdown determines increased non-verbal fluency, evidenced by the significant increase of the number of new drawings. We found worsened verbal span, while phonemic verbal fluency remained unchanged. Interestingly, we observed a significant tendency to use the left part of each box in the m-FPT correlated with TAS-20 and with the subscales that assess difficulty in describing and identifying feelings. Although our data were collected from a small sample, they evidence that the restriction of behaviors determines a leftward bias, suggesting a greater activation of the right hemisphere, intrinsically connected with the processing of non-verbal information and with the need to manage an emotional situation. (shrink)

Background: Nursing continues to gain legitimation epistemologically and ontologically as a scientific discipline throughout the world. If a profession gains respect as a true autonomous scientific profession, then this recognition has to be put in practice in all environments and geographical areas. Nursing professional dignity, as a self-regarding concept, does not have a clear definition in the literature, and it has only begun to be analyzed in the last 10 years. Objectives: The purpose of this meta-synthesis was to determine the (...) various factors that constitute the notion of nursing professional dignity. The target was to create a tentative model of the concept. Research design: The research design was a meta-synthesis (N = 15 original articles) of nursing professional dignity described in the literature, based on the guidelines by Noblit and Hare. Method and findings: Original studies were sought out from electronic databases and manual searches. The selection of literature was conducted on stages based on titles (n = 2595), abstracts (n = 70), and full-texts (n = 15) according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. From this analysis, a clear definition of nursing professional dignity emerged that underscored two main macro-dimensions constituting this intertwined, multidimensional, and complex notion: characteristics of the human beings and workplace elements. Conclusion: The recognition of nursing professional dignity could have a positive impact on patients because the results clearly showed that nurses are more prone to foster patients’ dignity, patients’ safety, and a better quality of care if their own dignity is respected. If nurses are uncomfortable, humiliated, or not seen in their professional role, it is difficult to give to others good care, good support, or good relationships. (shrink)

As early-career neuroethicists, we come to the field of neuroethics at a unique moment: we are well-situated to consider nearly two decades of neuroethics scholarship and identify challenges that have persisted across time. But we are also looking squarely ahead, embarking on the next generation of exciting and productive neuroethics scholarship. In this article, we both reflect backwards and turn our gaze forward. First, we highlight criticisms of neuroethics, both from scholars within the field and outside it, that have focused (...) on speculation and lack of skepticism; the dearth of consideration of broader social issues such as justice and equality, both with regard to who speaks for neuroethics as a field and who benefits from its recommendations and findings; and the insufficient focus on the practical impact of our ethical work. Second, we embrace the concept of “translational neuroethics” to outline a vision for neuroethics that is integrated, inclusive, and impactful. Integration can help us identify more pertinent, real-world issues, and move away from speculation; inclusivity can help ensure that the questions we attend to are not merely relevant to a single subgroup but aim toward just distribution of benefits; and impact can help us think beyond guidelines and recommendations to focus on implementation. Our goal is for this call to action to help shape neuroethics into a discipline that develops rigorous research agendas through relationships with interdisciplinary partners, that is broadly inclusive and attends to issues beyond novel neurotechnologies, and that is devoted to the translation of scholarship into practice. (shrink)

Women’s capacity to reproduce varies over the life span, and developmental goals such as family formation are age-graded and shaped by social norms about the appropriate age for completing specific developmental tasks. Thus, a woman’s age may be linked to her ideas about what an ideal partner should be like. With the goals of replicating and extending prior research, in this study we examined the role of age in women’s partner preferences across the globe. We investigated associations of age with (...) ideal long-term partner preferences in a cross-cultural sample of 17,254 single (i.e., unpartnered) heterosexual women, ages 18 to 67, from 147 countries. Data were collected via an online questionnaire, the Ideal Partner Survey. Confirming our preregistered hypotheses, we found no or only negligible age effects on preferences for kindness-supportiveness, attractiveness, financial security-successfulness, or education-intelligence. Age was, however, positively associated with preferences for confidence-assertiveness. Consistent with family formation goals, age was associated with an ideal partner’s parenting intentions (high until approximately age 30, then decreasing afterward). Age range deemed acceptable (and in particular, the discrepancy between one’s own age and the minimum ideal age of a partner) increased with age. This latter pattern also replicated in exploratory analyses based on subsamples of lesbian and bisexual women. In summary, age has a limited impact on partner preferences. Of the attributes investigated, only preference for confidence-assertiveness was linked with age. However, age range deemed acceptable and an ideal partner’s parenting intention, a dimension mostly neglected in earlier research, substantially vary with age. (shrink)

Shifts of attention within working memory based on retroactive (retro-) cues were shown to facilitate performance in working memory tasks. Although posterior asymmetries in the EEG, such as the contralateral delay activity (CDA), have been used to study the active storage of lateralized working memory representations, results on the relation of such asymmetric effects to retro-cue benefits remain inconclusive. We recorded EEG in a retro-cue working memory task with lateralized items and a continuous performance response. Following either a selective or (...) neutral retro-cue, participants adjusted the orientation of a central memory probe to the cued item. Selective retro-cues elicited an early posterior contralateral negativity (PCN), anterior directing attention negativity (ADAN) and a later modulation of CDA indicating that active storage was concentrated on the cued information. By dividing all trials into three within-condition performance quantiles, we could further show that high working memory accuracy was associated with a sustained increase of the CDA effect following the retro-cue. These results suggest that focusing resources on the active storage of relevant representations is an important factor regarding retro-cue benefits in working memory tasks. (shrink)

We present a case study of grammatical constructions and how their function in a single language can be captured through semantic and syntactic classification. Since 2016 an on-going joint project of UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow has been collecting and analyzing multiword grammatical constructions of Russian. The main product is the Russian Constructicon, which, with over two thousand two hundred constructions, is arguably the largest openly available constructicon resource (...) for any language. The combination of this large size with depth of analysis, containing both syntactic and semantic tags, makes it possible to view the interrelation of constructions as families and to discover trends in their behavior. Our annotation includes 53 semantic tags of varying frequency, with three tags that are by far more frequent than all the rest, accounting for 30% of the entire inventory of the Russian Constructicon. These three semantic types are Assessment, Attitude, and Intensity, all of which convey a speaker’s evaluation of a topic, in contrast to most of the other tags. Assessment and Attitude constructions are investigated in greater detail in this article. Secondary semantic tags reveal that negative evaluation among these two semantic types is more than twice as frequent as positive evaluation. Examples of negative evaluations are: for Assessment VP tak sebe, as in Na pianino ja igraju tak sebe “I play the piano so-so [lit. thus self]”; for Attitude s PronPers-Gen xvatit/xvatilo, as in S menja xvatit “I’m fed up [lit. from me enough].” In terms of syntax, the most frequent syntactic types of constructions in the Russian Constructicon are clausal constructions [constituting an independent clause like s PronPers-Gen xvatit/xvatilo ] and constructions with the anchor in the role of adverbial modifier. Our semantic and syntactic classification of this large body of Russian constructions makes it possible to postulate patterns of grammatical constructions constituting a radial category with central and peripheral types. Classification of large numbers of constructions reveals systematic relations that structure the grammar of a language. (shrink)

Exposure to environmental contextual changes, such as those occurring after an earthquake, requires individuals to learn novel routes around their environment, landmarks and spatial layout. In this study, we aimed to uncover whether contextual changes that occurred after the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake affected topographic memory in exposed survivors. We hypothesized that individuals exposed to environmental changes—individuals living in L’Aquila before, during and after the earthquake (hereafter called exposed participants, EPs)—improved their topographic memory skills compared with non-exposed participants (NEPs) who moved (...) to L’Aquila after the earthquake, as only EPs had to modify their previous cognitive map of L’Aquila. We also hypothesized that memory improvement was selective for the navigational space and did not generalize across other spatial and verbal domains. To test these hypotheses, we compared the topographic and spatial memory skills of 56 EPs without post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms to the skills of 47 NEPs using the Walking Corsi Test (WalCT; memory test in the navigational space) and the Corsi Block-Tapping Test (CBT; visuospatial memory test in the reaching space); EPs and NEPs were matched for gender, education and general navigational skills. A sub-group of participants also underwent the Rey-Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT; verbal memory test). The results showed that only EPs had better performances on topographic learning (TL) assessed using the WalCT rather than spatial learning assessed by the CBT. This outcome suggests the possibility that EPs specifically improved topographic memory. This effect may be due to continuous exposure to environmental changes that have required individuals to learn novel paths within the city and integrate novel information, such as “new towns,” into their pre-existing mental representation of the city. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed. (shrink)

The promises and risks of Artificial Intelligence permeate current policy statements and have attracted much attention by AI governance research. However, most analyses focus exclusively on AI policy on the national and international level, overlooking existing federal governance structures. This is surprising because AI is connected to many policy areas, where the competences are already distributed between the national and subnational level, such as research or economic policy. Addressing this gap, this paper argues that more attention should be dedicated to (...) subnational efforts to shape AI and asks which themes are discussed in subnational AI policy documents with a case study of Germany’s 16 states. Our qualitative analysis of 34 AI policy documents issued on the subnational level demonstrates that subnational efforts focus on knowledge transfer between research and industry actors, the commercialization of AI, different economic identities of the German states, and the incorporation of ethical principles. Because federal states play an active role in AI policy, analysing AI as a policy issue on different levels of government is necessary and will contribute to a better understanding of the developments and implementations of AI strategies in different national contexts. (shrink)

Human faces are one of the most prominent stimuli in the visual environment of young infants and convey critical information for the development of social cognition. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mask wearing has become a common practice outside the home environment. With masks covering nose and mouth regions, the facial cues available to the infant are impoverished. The impact of these changes on development is unknown but is critical to debates around mask mandates in early childhood settings. As infants grow, (...) they increasingly interact with a broader range of familiar and unfamiliar people outside the home; in these settings, mask wearing could possibly influence social development. In order to generate hypotheses about the effects of mask wearing on infant social development, in the present work, we systematically review N = 129 studies selected based on the most recent PRISMA guidelines providing a state-of-the-art framework of behavioral studies investigating face processing in early infancy. We focused on identifying sensitive periods during which being exposed to specific facial features or to the entire face configuration has been found to be important for the development of perceptive and socio-communicative skills. For perceptive skills, infants gradually learn to analyze the eyes or the gaze direction within the context of the entire face configuration. This contributes to identity recognition as well as emotional expression discrimination. For socio-communicative skills, direct gaze and emotional facial expressions are crucial for attention engagement while eye-gaze cuing is important for joint attention. Moreover, attention to the mouth is particularly relevant for speech learning. We discuss possible implications of the exposure to masked faces for developmental needs and functions. Providing groundwork for further research, we encourage the investigation of the consequences of mask wearing for infants’ perceptive and socio-communicative development, suggesting new directions within the research field. (shrink)

La Kantkrise (« crise kantienne ») est un des aspects les plus étudiés de la pensée de Heinrich von Kleist, aussi bien par les historiens de la philosophie que par les germanistes. Au cours de presque un siècle de recherches sur ce thème 2, les interprètes ont identifié différemment l’œuvre de Kant – ou l’auteur, autre que Kant 3 – qui aurait déclenché cette crise 4. Pour la première fois, le présent article cherche à identifier le motif déterminant de la (...) crise dans un concept et permet de réviser l’idée même d’une « crise », entendue comme un événement ponctuel et isolé, pour lui restituer son sens d’événement intérieur, appartenant à un itinéraire intellectuel déjà engagé. Il s’agit d’un concept central pour la réflexion théologique et philosophique de la seconde moitié du XVIII e siècle, qui se trouve aussi en plusieurs textes littéraires : la « destination de l’homme » ( Bestimmung des Menschen ). (shrink)

Over the last decades, educational programs involving age simulation suits emerged with the ambition to further the understanding of age-related loss experiences, enhance empathy and reduce negative attitudes toward older adults in healthcare settings and in younger age groups at large. However, the impact of such “instant aging” interventions on individuals’ personal views on aging have not been studied yet. The aim of the current study is to address possible effects of ASS interventions on multiple outcomes related to views on (...) aging, i.e., aging-related cognitions, awareness of age-related change and age stereotypes. Moreover, we explore effects on broader constructs with relevance to aging, i.e., perceived obsolescence, risk perceptions, as well as desired support through technology. In a within-subjects design, N = 40 participants went through a series of established geriatric assessments with and without an ASS. Views on aging constructs were assessed in standardized questionnaires before and after the ASS intervention. Changes in aging-related cognitions were observed, with more negative expectations regarding social integration and continuous development after wearing the ASS. AARC and age stereotypes did not change from pre- to post-assessment, but participants reported an increased susceptibility to age-associated impairments and stronger feelings of obsolescence. Those participants who exhibited higher difficulties in geriatric assessments while wearing the suit reported higher openness to be supported by intelligent assistive devices or robots afterwards. We conclude that ASS interventions should only be combined with education on losses and gains during the aging process to prevent negative effects on individual views on aging. On the other hand, potentials regarding technology acceptance and formation of intentions to engage in prevention and health behaviors among middle-aged to young-old adults are discussed. (shrink)

Human individuals often exhibit important differences in their sensitivity to ionising radiation. Extensive literature links radiation sensitivity with impaired DNA repair which is due to a lack of correct functioning in many proteins involved in DNA‐repair pathways and/or in DNA‐damage checkpoint responses. Given that ionising radiation is an important and widespread diagnostic and therapeutic tool, it is important to investigate further those factors and mechanisms that underlie individual radiosensitivity. Recently, evidence is accumulating that telomere function may well be involved in (...) cellular and organism responses to ionising radiation, broadening still further the currently complex and challenging scenario. BioEssays. BioEssays 28: 1172–1180, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Platonism, Ficino to Foucault explores some key chapters in the history Platonic philosophy from the revival of Plato in the fifteenth century to the new reading of Platonic dialogues promoted by the so-called ‘Critique of Modernity’.

The role played by language in our cognitive lives is a topic at the centre of contemporary debates in cognitive (neuro)science. In this paper we illustrate and compare two theories that offer embodied explanations of this role: the WAT (words as social tools) and the LENS (language is an embodied neuroenhancement and scaffold) theories. WAT and LENS differ from other current proposals, because they connect the impact of the neurologically realized language system on our cognition to the ways in which (...) language shapes our interaction with the physical and social environment. Examining these theories together, their tenets and supporting evidence, sharpens our understanding of each, but also contributes to a better understanding of the contribution that language might make to the acquisition, representation and use of abstract concepts. Here we focus on how language provides a source of inner grounding, especially metacognition and inner speech, and supports the flexibility of our thought. Overall, the paper outlines a promising research program focused on the importance of language to abstract concepts within the context of a flexible, multimodal, and multilevel conception of embodied cognition. (shrink)