Venturing into novel terrain poses physical risks to a female and her offspring. Females have a greater tendency to avoid physical harm, while males tend to have larger range sizes and often outperform females in navigation-related tasks. Given this backdrop, we expected that females would explore a novel environment with more caution than males, and that more-cautious exploration would negatively affect navigation performance. Participants explored a novel, large-scale, virtual environment in search of five objects, pointed in the direction of each (...) object from the origin, and then navigated back to the objects. We found that females demonstrated more caution while exploring as reflected in the increased amounts of pausing and revisiting of previously traversed locations. In addition, more pausing and revisiting behaviors led to degradation in navigation performance. Finally, individual levels of trait harm avoidance were positively associated with the amount of revisiting behavior during exploration. These findings support the idea that the fitness costs associated with long-distance travel may encourage females to take a more cautious approach to spatial exploration, and that this caution may partially explain the sex differences in navigation performance. (shrink)

While 23andMe aspires to be “the world's trusted source of personal genetic information,” the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) believes that the company's advertising practices have been anything but trustworthy. Last November, a harshly worded FDA “warning letter” demanded that the direct‐to‐consumer genetic testing company immediately discontinue marketing its unapproved “medical device.” The tussle between 23andMe and the FDA has attracted more attention than a typical disagreement between a company and a government agency. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes identify (...) 23andMe as a “Big Bang Disruption”: an invention that revolutionizes the existing market, foiling both industry incumbents and unprepared regulators. The outcome of the FDA's current review to hold the answer to the million‐dollar question: how will DTC genetic testing be regulated in the future? Ideally, the FDA's regulations should not pose undue burdens on consumers seeking personal genetic information but, rather, help consumers make a transition out of the consumer setting and into the medical setting. (shrink)

Insight problem solving is hindered by automated verbal–conceptual processes. Because mindfulness meditation training aims at “nonconceptual awareness” which involves a reduced influence of habitual verbal–conceptual processes on the interpretation of ongoing experience, mindfulness may facilitate insight problem solving. This hypothesis was examined across two studies . Participants in both studies completed a measure of trait mindfulness and a series of insight and noninsight problems. Further, participants in Study 2 completed measures of positive affect and a mindfulness or control training. The (...) results indicated that trait mindfulness predicts better insight but not noninsight problem solving , this relation is maintained when controlling for positive affect , mindfulness training improves insight but not noninsight problem solving and this improvement is partially mediated by state mindfulness . These findings are the first to document a direct relation between mindfulness and creativity. (shrink)

We review Side Effects, a 2013 film involving bioethics, pharmaceuticals, and financial conspiracies. After the main character Emily unsuccessfully attempts suicide, she begins receiving care from a psychiatrist, Dr. Banks. Following numerous events, she is placed on a fictional antidepressant, Ablixa, which leads her to suffer from sleepwalking. During an episode of sleepwalking she commits a serious crime. The film poses an interesting dilemma: How responsible would the physician be in this instance? We analyze this question by applying numerous ethical (...) principles. (shrink)

Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort. This observation explains the famous finding that the most frequent words in a language tend to be short. A related prediction is that, even within words of the same length, the most frequent word forms should be the ones that are easiest to produce and understand. Using orthographics as a proxy for phonetics, we test (...) this hypothesis using corpora of 96 languages from Wikipedia. We find that, across a variety of languages and language families and controlling for length, the most frequent forms in a language tend to be more orthographically well‐formed and have more orthographic neighbors than less frequent forms. We interpret this result as evidence that lexicons are structured by language usage pressures to facilitate efficient communication. (shrink)

¡Presente! develops a lived theology of nonviolence through an extended case study of the movement to close the School of the Americas (also known as the SOA or WHINSEC). Specifically,it analyzes how the presence of the dead—a presence proclaimed at the annual vigil of the School of the Americas Watch—shapes a distinctive, transnational, nonviolent movement. Kyle B.T. Lambelet argues that such a messianic affirmation need not devolve into violence or sectarianism and, in fact, generates practical reasoning. By developing a (...) messianic political theology in dialogue with the SOA Watch movement, Lambelet's work contributes to Christian ethics as he explores the political implications of the resurrection of the dead. This book contributes to studies of strategic nonviolence and civil resistance by demonstrating how religious and moral dynamics remain an essential part of such struggles. (shrink)

What should we make of the apocalyptic tone taken up by politicians, journalists, scientists, and activists? Some environmental thinkers such as Michael Shellenberger contend that alarming rhetoric distracts us from the technological and governance challenges presented by climate change. In the article, it is argued that retrieving a practical apocalyptic political theology from the Christian tradition can both clarify conceptual contradictions within this discourse as well as offer a practical orientation toward living within ecological endings. Amid the cascade of environmental (...) crises we are living through, apocalyptic practices of renunciation of the world offer a guide and discipline for living in the end. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the ambivalence we rightly feel toward leaders by examining the relationship between charismatic authority and moral exemplarity. Drawing on the social theory of Max Weber, and in dialogue with a case study of an anti-militarism movement called the SOA (School of Americas) Watch, I demonstrate that through a “politics of sacrifice” leaders synchronize their own stories with those of communally recognized exemplars and act in ways that evidence a solidarity in the suffering of those (...) exemplars thereby generating their charismatic authority. While performing crucial strategic, motivational, and pedagogical roles, this charisma also introduces problematic temptations to authoritarianism that short-circuit the practical reasoning that exemplars supposedly help to form. In the end this leaves our sense of ambivalence intact. What is needed, I argue, are practices of critique that reopen the distance between leader and follower and thus allow the possibility of practical reason. (shrink)

Although the mapping between form and meaning is often regarded as arbitrary, there are in fact well-known constraints on words which are the result of functional pressures associated with language use and its acquisition. In particular, languages have been shown to encode meaning distinctions in their sound properties, which may be important for language learning. Here, we investigate the relationship between semantic distance and phonological distance in the large-scale structure of the lexicon. We show evidence in 100 languages from a (...) diverse array of language families that more semantically similar word pairs are also more phonologically similar. This suggests that there is an important statistical trend for lexicons to have semantically similar words be phonologically similar as well, possibly for functional reasons associated with language learning. (shrink)

Executive functions (EFs) and impulsivity are dimensions of self-regulation that are both related to psychopathology. However, self-report measures of impulsivity and laboratory EF tasks typically display small correlations, and existing research indicates that impulsivity and EFs may tap separate aspects of self-regulation that independently statistically predict psychopathology in adulthood. However, relationships between EFs, impulsivity, and psychopathology may be different in childhood compared to adulthood. Here, we examine whether these patterns hold in the baseline assessment of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive (...) Development (ABCD) sample, a national sample of over 11,000 children (including 749 twin pairs) ages 9–10 years. We examine the phenotypic and genetic relationships among latent variables for different components of EFs and multiple facets of impulsivity. Additionally, we assess how EFs and impulsivity relate to composite measures and latent variables of psychopathology derived from parent report. EFs were weakly correlated with impulsivity, and the strength varied by impulsivity facet, emphasizing their separability. We did not identify significant genetic and environmental correlations between EFs and impulsivity. Moreover, controlling for their small relationships with each other, both EFs and some facets of impulsivity statistically predicted an Externalizing factor, attention problems, and social problems, and twin analyses suggested these relationships were genetic in origin. These findings indicate that EFs and impulsivity represent phenotypically and genetically separable aspects of self-regulation that are both transdiagnostic correlates of psychopathology in childhood. (shrink)

Combined non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) and rehabilitation interventions have the potential to improve function in children with unilateral cerebral palsy (UCP), however their effects on developing brain function are not well understood. In a proof-of-principle study, we used single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure changes in corticospinal excitability and relationships to motor performance following a randomized controlled trial consisting of 10 days of combined constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) and cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) applied to the contralesional motor (...) cortex. Twenty children and young adults (mean age = 12 years, 9 months, range = 7 years, 7 months, 21 years, 7 months) with UCP participated. TMS testing was performed before, after, and 6 months after the intervention to measure motor evoked potential (MEP) amplitude and cortical silent period (CSP) duration. The association between neurophysiologic and motor outcomes and differences in excitability between hemispheres were examined. Contralesional MEP amplitude decreased as hypothesized in five of five participants receiving active tDCS immediately after and 6 months after the intervention, however no statistically significant differences between intervention groups were noted for MEP amplitude [mean difference = −323.9 μV, 95% CI = (−989, 341), p = 0.34] or CSP duration [mean difference = 3.9 ms, 95% CI = (−7.7, 15.5), p = 0.51]. Changes in corticospinal excitability were not statistically associated with improvements in hand function after the intervention. Across all participants, MEP amplitudes measured in the more-affected hand from both contralesional (mean difference = −474.5 μV) and ipsilesional hemispheres (−624.5 μV) were smaller compared to the less-affected hand. Assessing neurophysiologic changes after tDCS in children with UCP provides an understanding of long-term effects on brain excitability to help determine its potential as a therapeutic intervention. Additional investigation into the neurophysiologic effects of tDCS in larger samples of children with UCP are needed to confirm these findings. (shrink)

Bernat (2024) and Busch (2024) both argue that the clamping of cerebral vasculature in NRP-cDCD ensures sufficient diagnostic certainty of death that the procedure does not violate the Dead Donor R...

In their article, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland defend the moral permissibility of cDCD, suggesting that much of the controversy around this donation practice has been the result of a misinterpretatio...

Depuis une vingtaine d'annees, on assiste un peu partout a un regain d'interet pour les ecrits socratiques de Xenophon. Que Xenophon ne nous donne pas davantage que Platon un portrait historiquement fiable de Socrate peut etre considere comme un acquis de la critique du XXe siecle. Laissant transparaitre dans son temoignage des options profondement differentes de celles de Platon, Xenophon temoigne par la meme, cependant, des tensions, voire des oppositions qui traversaient le milieu socratique autour du souvenir et de la (...) comprehension de la personne de Socrate: cette seule consideration suffit a faire de Xenophon une source essentielle pour notre connaissance de l'immediat apres Socrate et, par dela, pour notre intelligence de l'histoire de la reception de Socrate dans les siecles ulterieurs. Le colloque dont sont issues les etudes rassemblees dans ce volume, organise a l'Universite de Provence (Aix-Marseille I) du 6 au 9 novembre 2003, s'inscrit dans cette perspective. Plus qu'un bilan de la nouvelle orientation des etudes xenophontiennes, qu'il est encore trop tot pour etablir, on y verra l'illustration de la diversite d'approches dont est susceptible le temoignage de Xenophon sur Socrate. Due a Louis-Andre Dorion, une bibliographie des etudes sur les ecrits socratiques de Xenophon publiees dans le dernier quart de siecle temoigne de la vitalite retrouvee de ce domaine de recherche. (shrink)

Unlike first-person Moorean sentences, it’s not always awkward to assert, “p, but you don’t know that p.” This can seem puzzling: after all, one can never get one’s audience to know the asserted content by speaking thus. Nevertheless, such assertions can be conversationally useful, for instance, by helping speaker and addressee agree on where to disagree. I will argue that such assertions also make trouble for the growing family of views about the norm of assertion that what licenses proper assertion (...) is not the initiating epistemic position of the speaker but the resulting epistemic position of the audience. (shrink)

Before a general cognitive model for recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) is accepted, there must be more research into the neuropsychological and cognitive characteristics of the various disorders in which they occur. Currently available data are insufficient to distinguish whether the similar phenomenology of RCVH across different disorders is in fact produced by a single or by multiple cognitive mechanisms.

Pseudogapping is no misnomer. Despite the many tempting similarities, Gapping and Pseudogapping are distinct constructions. Pseudogapping is a special instance of VP Ellipsis, while Gapping, I will argue, is a special instance of across-the-board movement. Squeezing Gapping into across-the-board movement has its own discomforts, however, which I will suggest can be remedied by re-tailoring our syntax to include string-based output constraints. I give a sketch of one such alteration that involves apparent Left Branch Condition violations.

Mobile devices with health apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, crowd-sourced information, and other data sources have enabled research by new classes of researchers. Independent researchers, citizen scientists, patient-directed researchers, self-experimenters, and others are not covered by federal research regulations because they are not recipients of federal financial assistance or conducting research in anticipation of a submission to the FDA for approval of a new drug or medical device. This article addresses the difficult policy challenge of promoting the welfare and interests of (...) research participants, as well as the public, in the absence of regulatory requirements and without discouraging independent, innovative scientific inquiry. The article recommends a series of measures, including education, consultation, transparency, self-governance, and regulation to strike the appropriate balance. (shrink)

For several terms at Cambridge in 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured on the philosophical foundations of mathematics. A lecture class taught by Wittgenstein, however, hardly resembled a lecture. He sat on a chair in the middle of the room, with some of the class sitting in chairs, some on the floor. He never used notes. He paused frequently, sometimes for several minutes, while he puzzled out a problem. He often asked his listeners questions and reacted to their replies. Many meetings were (...) largely conversation. These lectures were attended by, among others, D. A. T. Gasking, J. N. Findlay, Stephen Toulmin, Alan Turing, G. H. von Wright, R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies. Notes taken by these last four are the basis for the thirty-one lectures in this book. The lectures covered such topics as the nature of mathematics, the distinctions between mathematical and everyday languages, the truth of mathematical propositions, consistency and contradiction in formal systems, the logicism of Frege and Russell, Platonism, identity, negation, and necessary truth. The mathematical examples used are nearly always elementary. (shrink)

Plato's Euthyrphro, Apology, andCrito portray Socrates' words and deeds during his trial for disbelieving in the Gods of Athens and corrupting the Athenian youth, and constitute a defense of the man Socrates and of his way of life, the philosophic life. The twelve essays in the volume, written by leading classical philosophers, investigate various aspects of these works of Plato, including the significance of Plato's characters, Socrates's revolutionary religious ideas, and the relationship between historical events and Plato's texts.

Social anxiety may disrupt the empathic process, and well-regulated empathy is critical for navigating the social world. Two studies aimed to further understand empathy in the context of social anxiety. Study 1 compared individuals with elevated or normative social anxiety on a measure assessing cognitive and affective empathy for positive and negative emotions conveyed by other people (“targets”), completed under social threat. Relative to individuals with normative social anxiety, individuals with elevated social anxiety had greater cognitive empathy and no differences (...) in affective empathy, regardless of emotion type. As greater cognitive empathy can be maladaptive, Study 2 tested whether this could be down-regulated. Individuals with elevated social anxiety underwent emotional working memory training (eWMT) for negative emotional information, or control training (CT). Effects on an empathy measure completed under social threat were assessed. Cognitive empathy for negative emotions decreased following eWMT but not CT, and this was only evident for those with higher pre-training working memory capacity. Cognitive empathy for positive emotions and affective empathy were not affected. Overall, social anxiety is associated with aberrant elevated cognitive empathy for negative and positive emotions, and the deviation in cognitive empathy for negative emotions can be regulated with eWMT for certain individuals.Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry identifier: ACTRN12618001196235.. (shrink)

Some writers, such as John Fischer and Michael McKenna, have recently claimed that an agent can be morally responsible for a wrong action and yet not be blameworthy for that action. A careful examination of the claim, however, suggests two readings. On one reading, there are further conditions on blameworthiness beyond freely and wittingly doing wrong. On another innocuous reading, there are no such further conditions. Despite Fischer and McKenna’s attempts to offer further conditions on blameworthiness in addition to responsibility (...) for wrongdoing, I argue that only the innocuous reading is plausible. Once we distinguish between blame being deserved and blame being all-things-considered appropriate, we need not appeal to further conditions on blameworthiness. This discussion has important upshots regarding how compatibilists respond to certain manipulation arguments and how proponents of derived responsibility respond to criticism that agents are responsible even for outcomes that are not reasonably foreseeable. (shrink)

Beginning in the 20th century, scientific research came to be dominated by a growing class of credentialed, professional scientists who overwhelmingly displaced the learned amateurs of an earlier time. By the end of the century, however, the exclusive realm of professional scientists conducting research was joined, to a degree, by “citizen scientists.” The term originally encompassed non-professionals assisting professional scientists by contributing observations and measurements to ongoing research enterprises. These collaborations were especially common in the environmental sciences, where citizen scientists (...) participated in counting wildlife and measuring environmental conditions. Later, patient groups began to play a more active role in supporting clinical trials and collecting health records from affected individuals. (shrink)

The nearly omnipotent character known only as “Q” dramatically enters the Star Trek universe when he puts all humanity in the person of Captain Jean‐Luc Picard, on trial in the first episode of TNG. Acting as self‐professed prosecutor, judge, and jury, Q promises Picard an “absolutely equitable” trial, only to coerce Picard into pleading “guilty” by threatening to kill his crew. Q could be like the “Leviathan” of Thomas Hobbes (1588‐1679), an absolute sovereign who has the power to keep people (...) from warring with each other, but who can't be held accountable or subject to any civil law in the use of that power. Enlisting Hobbes and Locke, this chapter examines the motives behind Q's enigmatic actions and sees what Q, deep down, might believe about justice. Hobbes begins with a basic right of nature that all people possess: our liberty to ensure the preservation of our own life. (shrink)

Although Hurricane Katrina precipitated considerable reflection across various media, a practice crucial to our capacities to apprehend and interpret the disaster has not yet been analyzed as such. I call this practice generative assembly. I don’t mean the events of emergency and political gathering that took place in response to the massive storm and fatal, preventable levee failures—although I will propose connections between different forms of assembly. Instead I mean a kind of documentary practice. That practice, which can be undertaken (...) individually or in collaboration, and sometimes at anonymous remove, involves the work of assembling records and signifiers related to the disaster into particular kinds of media artifacts. Those artifacts— which take shape in formats as varied as comics, photobooks, paintings, films, exhibitions, and multithousand-item online archives—characteristically maintain the active appearance and interactive potential of selection and arrangement. In exhibiting such qualities, or so I will argue, these assembly-based artifacts support various articulable and often highly effective kinds of generativity. And thus, I will further suggest, these artifacts can constitute especially powerful means of intervening in prevailing conditions of representation and remembrance around events of environmental and social violence. Crucially, those material legacies of generative assembly can also fall short, fail, and deceive, and this is especially true of those assemblies that take digital forms. It is my contention, however, that we would be misguided if we thus entirely dismissed such assemblies or if we refused their potential for dissident reuse or generative reassembly. (shrink)

Perceptual Confidence is the view that perceptual experiences assign degrees of confidence. After introducing, clarifying, and motivating Perceptual Confidence, I catalogue some of its more interesting consequences, such as the way it blurs the distinction between veridical and illusory experiences, a distinction that is sometimes said to carry a lot of metaphysical weight. I also explain how Perceptual Confidence fills a hole in our best scientific theories of perception and why it implies that experiences don't have objective accuracy conditions.