No cure yet exists for devastating Alzheimer's disease (AD), despite many years and humongous efforts to find efficacious pharmacological treatments. So far, neither designing drugs to disaggregate amyloid plaques nor tackling solely inflammation turned out to be decisive. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and, in particular, extracellular vesicles (EVs) originating from them could be proposed as an alternative, strategic approach to attack the pathology. Indeed, MSC‐EVs—owing to their ability to deliver lipids/proteins/enzymes/microRNAs endowed with anti‐inflammatory, amyloid‐β degrading, and neurotrophic activities—may be exploited (...) as therapeutic tools to restore synaptic function, prevent neuronal death, and slow down memory impairment in AD. Herein the results presented in the most recently published studies on this topic are critically evaluated, providing a strong rationale for possible employment of MSC‐EVs in AD. (shrink)

Drawing out literal and metaphorical meanings of 'foreignness' this wide-ranging volume offers much to scholars of postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies seeking new approaches to the study of alterity.

This article argues the necessity of overcoming the hierarchical and pyramidal conception of the central nervous system that has subordinated the motor function to the higher brain activities for at least the last 150 years. The evolution of some motor modes of behavior?such as the ability to construct and manipulate instruments?has given rise to an ?embodied logic? underpinning not only the development of models of action and prediction but also the production of gestures and sequences of syllables that are at (...) the basis of human communication. Whether it is a matter of shaking someone's hand, writing a letter, or whatever, each executive function?controlled by a series of nervous structures and mental procedures that process the information?requires behaviors that are oriented to a specific end. (shrink)

Free will is usually defined by three conditions: the ability to do otherwise; control of one’s own choices; responsiveness to reasons. The compatibility of free will with determinism lies at the heart of the philosophical debate at the metaphysical level. This debate, while being increasingly refined, has not yet reached a conclusion. Recently, neuroscience and empirical psychology have tried to settle the problem of free will with a series of experiments that go in the direction of so-called illusionism: free will (...) as the conscious control of our behavior cannot exist, being a mere illusion. But even in this case, the experimental results are challenged at various levels. Considering that in most moral and legal systems, the subject’s liability derives from their freedom, the usefulness of preserving the concept of freedom – which incidentally responds to a very strong commonsensical intuition – suggests the need for an operational solution. This could be done by resorting to the concepts of capacity and cognitive control, which are measured by a set of well-established neuropsychological tests. Our preliminary proposal is to create an index, the first step towards a specific quantification and measurement of free will, to be used especially in ethical and legal contexts. Theoretical premises, practical difficulties and objections to this approach are also discussed and addressed. (shrink)

Research on Augmented Reality in education has demonstrated that AR applications designed with diverse components boost student motivation in educational settings. However, most of the research conducted to date, does not define exactly what those components are and how these components positively affect student motivation. This study, therefore, attempts to identify some of the components that positively affect student motivation in mobile AR learning experiences to contribute to the design and development of motivational AR learning experiences for the Vocational Education (...) and Training level of education. To identify these components, a research model constructed from the literature was empirically validated with data obtained from two sources: 35 students from four VET institutes interacting with an AR application for learning for a period of 20 days, and a self-report measure obtained from the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey. We found that the following variables: use of scaffolding, real-time feedback, degree of success, time on-task and learning outcomes are positively correlated with the four dimensions of the ARCS model of motivation: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. Implications of these results are also described. (shrink)

This volume presents a collection of about 80 very brief, accessible essays written by international experts from medicine, social sciences, and the humanities, ...

Se presentan los resultados obtenidos en la tesis de maestría Sistema de talleres de trabajo educativo para la capacitación del profesor guía de Medicina en Nuevitas con el objetivo de demostrar el impacto a partir de su implementación en la brigada estudiantil. Se exponen las definiciones elaboradas y las contextualizaciones. Se concluye que el sistema contribuyó al adecuado desempeño del profesor guía y al desarrollo del modo de actuación de los estudiantes. La rapidez y la calidad que implicó en la (...) praxis educativa constituyó el resultado más importante en el contexto de la carrera de Medicina en la Filial. Results achieved through the master's thesis "Educational work workshops system for the Medicine degree guiding teacher training" in Nuevitas are presented, aimed at demonstrating its impact starting from its implementation on a class. Elaborate definitions and contexts are exposed. The conclusionreached through it was that the system contributed to the adequate guiding teacher's performance and to the development of students' behavior. The speed and quality it involved in educational praxis constituted the most important result in the context of the Medicine degree in La Filial town. (shrink)

En el contexto de cambios del proceso de globalización, la medicalización constituye una problemática central en la agenda de salud internacional. Durante la década de 1990, comenzó la expansión internacional del diagnóstico de trastorno por déficit de atención e hiperactividad (TDAH), entre otros factores, merced a la creciente relevancia de actores no médicos en el proceso y de legislaciones específicas para diferentes diagnósticos. El artículo busca contribuir a un análisis del espacio que le otorga la prensa escrita on line a (...) los procesos de medicalización del TDAH en Argentina en el siglo XXI, como aporte a una lectura panorámica de los procesos en la región y a nivel internacional, y como contribución a un área de vacancia en los estudios sociales. Para este artículo, analizamos 236 artículos on line de periódicos argentinos de alcance nacional y provincial entre 2001 y 2017. Para el relevamiento se diseñaron mecanismos de selección y filtro, con criterios y herramientas de búsqueda y procesamiento de noticias. Se efectuaron estimaciones de regularidad de tópicos emergentes y procesamientos parciales de información, incluyendo, entre otras dimensiones, año, jurisdicción, medio, fecha, sección, título, categoría, características de la nota, palabras clave, concepto o nombre del problema, fármaco/droga, tratamiento, actores sociales y recomendaciones. Con el artículo nos interesa engrosar los todavía escasos estudios que aportan a la comprensión de cómo el diagnóstico de TDAH está migrando a diferentes regiones del globo y, más específicamente, cómo está posicionándose como un problema de salud internacional. Los resultados muestran que, en los procesos de medicalización del TDAH en niños y niñas, la prensa escrita argentina (nacional y provincial) se constituye en un actor no médico relevante tanto en la institucionalización de la problemática como en la presentación de líneas terapéuticas a seguir y en acciones orientadas al impulso de legislaciones específicas. (shrink)

This book on the Tripurārahasya, a South Indian Sanskrit work which occupies a unique place in the Śākta literature, is a study of the Śrīvidyā and Śākta traditions in the context of South Indian intellectual history in the late middle ages. Associated with the religious tradition known as Śrīvidyā and devoted to the cult of the Goddess Tripurā, the text was probably composed between the 13th and the 16th century CE. The analysis of its narrative parts addresses questions about the (...) relationships between Tantric and Purāṇic goddesses. The discussion of its philosophical and theological teachings tackles problems related to the relationships between Sākta and Śaiva traditions. The stylistic devices adopted by the author(s) of the work deal uniquely with doctrinal and ritual elements of the Śrīvidyā through the medium of a literary and poetic language. This stylistic peculiarity distinguishes the Tripurārahasya from many other Tantric texts, characterized by a more technical language. The book is intended for researchers in the field of Asian Studies, Indology, Philosophical, Theological or Religious Studies, Hindu Studies, Tantric Studies and South Asian Religion and Philosophy, in particular those interested in Śākta and Śaiva philosophic-religious traditions. (shrink)

The question of the dimensionality of space has informed the development of physics since the beginning of the twentieth century in the quest for a unified picture of quantum processes and gravitation. Scientists have worked within various approaches to explain why the universe appears to have a certain number of spatial dimensions. The question of why space has three dimensions has a genuinely philosophical nature that can be shaped as a problem of justifying a contingent necessity of the world. In (...) contrast to explanations of three-dimensionality based on anthropic arguments, we support the search for a theory that provides a justification for the dimensionality of space based on a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning applied to science. In doing so, we argue that Kant correctly approached the question in “Thoughts on the true estimation of living forces” by connecting space dimensionality and the inverse square law. In expounding the strategy of Kant’s argument, we describe the main features of a general Kantian explanation of the dimensionality of space and discuss them with respect to current accounts of explanation in the philosophy of science, such as inference to the best explanation and the deductive-nomological model. (shrink)

The series is devoted to the study of scientific and philosophical texts from the Classical and the Islamic world handed down in Arabic. Through critical text editions and monographs, it provides access to ancient scientific inquiry as it developed in a continuous tradition from Antiquity to the modern period. All editions are accompanied by translations and philological and explanatory notes.

This essay argues that despite of the feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty his phenomenology can be positively appropriated to the theory of sexual difference. It focuses on three issues: the first one is closely linked to the Phenomenology of Perception and introduces a concept of "difference as differentiation". The second one is concerned with the intersubjective dimension of sexuality and will be called a "sexual syncretism". Finally, I’m referring to Merleau-Ponty's notion of "chiasm" in his late work The Visible and the (...) Invisible in order to apply it to the theory of sexual difference. At this point, the difference between sexual beings will be conceptualized as "chiasmatic intertwining". In doing so, I hope to show that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is a helpful resource for philosophical research that is mainly concerned with the questions of sexuality and sexual difference. (shrink)

Most everyday tasks involve multiple modalities, which raises the question of how the processing of these modalities is coordinated by the cognitive system. In this paper, we focus on the coordination of visual attention and linguistic processing during speaking. Previous research has shown that objects in a visual scene are fixated before they are mentioned, leading us to hypothesize that the scan pattern of a participant can be used to predict what he or she will say. We test this hypothesis (...) using a data set of cued scene descriptions of photo-realistic scenes. We demonstrate that similar scan patterns are correlated with similar sentences, within and between visual scenes; and that this correlation holds for three phases of the language production process (target identification, sentence planning, and speaking). We also present a simple algorithm that uses scan patterns to accurately predict associated sentences by utilizing similarity-based retrieval. (shrink)

The human sentence processor is able to make rapid predictions about upcoming linguistic input. For example, upon hearing the verb eat, anticipatory eye-movements are launched toward edible objects in a visual scene. However, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie anticipation remain to be elucidated in ecologically valid contexts. Previous research has, in fact, mainly used clip-art scenes and object arrays, raising the possibility that anticipatory eye-movements are limited to displays containing a small number of objects in a visually impoverished context. In (...) Experiment 1, we confirm that anticipation effects occur in real-world scenes and investigate the mechanisms that underlie such anticipation. In particular, we demonstrate that real-world scenes provide contextual information that anticipation can draw on: When the target object is not present in the scene, participants infer and fixate regions that are contextually appropriate. Experiment 2 investigates whether such contextual inference requires the co-presence of the scene, or whether memory representations can be utilized instead. The same real-world scenes as in Experiment 1 are presented to participants, but the scene disappears before the sentence is heard. We find that anticipation occurs even when the screen is blank, including when contextual inference is required. We conclude that anticipatory language processing is able to draw upon global scene representations to make contextual inferences. These findings are compatible with theories assuming contextual guidance, but posit a challenge for theories assuming object-based visual indices. (shrink)

When people communicate, they coordinate a wide range of linguistic and non-linguistic behaviors. This process of coordination is called alignment, and it is assumed to be fundamental to successful communication. In this paper, we question this assumption and investigate whether disalignment is a more successful strategy in some cases. More specifically, we hypothesize that alignment correlates with task success only when communication is interactive. We present results from a spot-the-difference task in which dyads of interlocutors have to decide whether they (...) are viewing the same scene or not. Interactivity was manipulated in three conditions by increasing the amount of information shared between interlocutors. We use recurrence quantification analysis to measure the alignment between the scan-patterns of the interlocutors. We found that interlocutors who could not exchange feedback aligned their gaze more, and that increased gaze alignment correlated with decreased task success in this case. When feedback was possible, in contrast, interlocutors utilized it to better organize their joint search strategy by diversifying visual attention. This is evidenced by reduced overall alignment in the minimal feedback and full dialogue conditions. However, only the dyads engaged in a full dialogue increased their gaze alignment over time to achieve successful performances. These results suggest that alignment per se does not imply communicative success, as most models of dialogue assume. Rather, the effect of alignment depends on the type of alignment, on the goals of the task, and on the presence of feedback. (shrink)

The need for European citizens to be more involved in scientific research has emerged from the conclusions of the studies commissioned by the EC and by independent bodies. In the first part of this contribution, I will discuss the question of whether a dialogue between society and science is desirable. I will attempt to claim that at least one of the reasons why the dialogue between science and society should be defended has been underestimated in the course of most of (...) the studies carried out: the fact the scientific knowledge helps to a create a better, more rounded, more aware human being which can only benefit society. Subsequently, I will deal with the various genres of scientific literature. While in modern times, communication of scientific discoveries has been reduced to the article, in the nineteenth century scientists made use of more varied literary forms such as journals, letters and narrative essays which were more accessible to those who were not specialists but nevertheless curious about scientific matters. I believe that these more popular forms of writing helped to close the gap between the public and science. (shrink)

Advances in genetics and related biotechnologies are having a profound effect on sport, raising important ethical questions about the limits and possibilities of the human body. Drawing on real case studies and grounded in rigorous scientific evidence, this book offers an ethical critique of current practices and explores the intersection of genetics, ethics and sport. Written by two of the world's leading authorities on the ethics of biotechnology in sport, the book addresses the philosophical implications of the latest scientific developments (...) and technological data. Distinguishing fact from popular myth and science fiction, it covers key topics such as the genetic basis of sport performance and the role of genetic testing in talent identification and development. Its ten chapters discuss current debates surrounding issues such as the shifting relationship between genetics, sports medicine and sports science, gene enhancement, gene transfer technology, doping and disability sport. The first book to be published on this important subject in more than a decade, this is fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in the ethics of sport, bioethics or sport performance. (shrink)

What are the relevant values to the appraisal of research programs? This question remains hotly debated, as philosophers have recently proposed many lists of values potentially relevant to scientific appraisal. Surprisingly, despite being mentioned in many lists, little attention has been paid to fruitfulness. It is unclear how fruitfulness should be explicated, and whether it has any substantial role in scientific appraisal. In this paper, I argue we should explicate fruitfulness as the capacity to develop of research programs. Moreover, I (...) provide a novel strategy to assess and compare the fruitfulness of programs focused on their research questions and heuristics. To illustrate how this strategy would work, I will discuss a case study, namely the adaptationist program in evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

The paper considers one of the most enigmatic problems of Wittgenstein`s Tractatus - the problem of solipsism. The authorś task is to reveal how the discussion of solipsism illuminates Wittgenstein`s metaphysical view in this treatise. Wittgenstein`s method is considered as one through which the status of what cannot be said is demonstrated. Wittgenstein has not embrased solipsism or idealism in the Tractatus, and neither has he rejected metaphysics as a whole. His attack has been directed against dogmatic philosophy and ethics, (...) against the effort to say what cannot be said in true/false propositions. The discussion of solipsism brings into philosophy the importance of metaphysical "I" as a transcendental limit of the world and language. Wittgenstein`s aim in the Tractatus has been twofold: a) to show the nonsensicality of philosophical, ethical, aesthetical propositions , b) to emphasize, that the inexpresibility of the higher is the most important thing in our lives. (shrink)

In the spring of 1784 the Marquis of Puységur, a great landowner and colonel in an artillery regiment, was called to the bedside of Victor, the son of his steward, who was suffering from pneumonia. Puységur was a follower of the new holistic medicine taught in an atmosphere of intense enthusiasm and scandal by Franz-Anton Mesmer, an Austrian doctor who had been living in Paris for several years. As a disciple of Mesmer, he intended to direct his ‘vital fluid’ onto (...) the young patient, by means of ‘magnetic passes’, to provoke ‘spasms’ which would lead to a calm state and an improvement in health. But things did not go as anticipated. Instead of displaying the anticipated spasms, the young Victor sank into a strange state of unconsciousness which, at first sight, resembled a deep sleep. Then he revived once more and came to life with a new personality. Freed from his inhibitions, he no longer spoke his habitual dialect, but the French of aristocrats, and he had no hesitation in berating his school teacher, whose secret thoughts he appeared to be able to read. Finally, he forecast the stages by which he would be cured and the remedies which would be suitable for him. Puységur wrote down all these strange facts and the following year he published a report which caused a sensation. Soon, throughout France, somnambulists appeared and observations about their subjects gathered. From that time onwards, the incomprehensible facts apparently evident in ‘provoked’ or ‘artificial somnambulism’ and also in ‘magnetic sleep’ - such expressions were used by Puységur and his followers for the state that he had just discovered - were to give rise to huge controversy. The Marquis of Puységur triggered the development nineteenth century of a movement of reflections and practices which have generally been referred to by the expression ‘animal magnetism’, invented by Mesmer. On the eve of the Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century this movement held a real fascination for philosophers, writers, and scholars. But there has been a tendency to overlook this episode in European culture, which has ultimately become a “lost continent” in our own period. (shrink)

This paper explores contract cheating from the perspectives of researchers at three post-secondary institutions in Alberta, Canada, describing their efforts to develop and advance awareness of, interventions against, and responses to contract cheating at their respective institutions. Contract cheating is when a third party produces or completes academic work for a student, and the student then presents the work as their own. The student might have personal connections to the third party, or the student might pay a fee and outsource (...) the academic work to the third party. All three institutions are experiencing an increase in the incidence of contract cheating, which is consistent with trends at colleges and universities across Canada and the world. Contract cheating is not a new phenomenon, but it is a growing one, due in part to students having access to thousands of online companies offering to help them with their academic work. This paper examines personal narratives from four researchers and identifies five key themes: types of contract cheating, students, awareness, evidence and policy implications, and educational development. (shrink)