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The ontogeny of phonological categories and the primacy of lexical learning in linguistic development.

In this paper, we draw on recent developments in several areas of cognitive science that suggest that the lexicon is at the core of grammatical generalizations at several different levels of representation. Evidence comes from many sources, including recent studies on language processing in adults and on language acquisition in children. Phonological behavior is influenced very early by pattern frequency in the lexicon of the ambient language, and we propose that phonological acquisition might provide the initial bootstrapping into grammatical generalization in general. The phonological categories over which pattern frequencies are calculated, however, are neither transparently available in the audiovisual signal nor deterministically fixed by the physiological and perceptual capacities of the species. Therefore, we need several age-appropriate models of how the lexicon can influence a child's interactions with the ambient language over the course of phonological acquisition.

Child↗

We saw it all along: visual hindsight bias in children and adults.

We traced the developmental origins and trajectory of the hindsight bias. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-old children and adults identified gradually clarifying images of degraded common objects on a computer. Half the time, observers did not know in advance what the object would become. The rest of the time, observers knew the object's identity in advance and estimated when a naive same-age peer would identify the clarifying object. In two experiments, children and adults demonstrated hindsight bias by using advance knowledge to overestimate their same-age peers' ability to identify the objects. The magnitude of this bias declined across age in one experiment, but remained relatively stable over age in the other experiment. These findings link developmental psychology and adult cognitive science.

Adult↗

Development of an information source for patients and the public about general practice services: an action research study.

OBJECTIVE: The publication of information about the performance of health-care providers is regarded as central to promoting greater accountability and empowering patients to exercise choice. The evidence suggests that the public is not very interested in accessing or using current sources of information. This study aimed to explore the information needs of patients in the context of UK primary care and to develop an information source about general practice services, designed to be usable by and useful to patients. DESIGN: An action research study making use of data from formal and informal interviews, focus groups, participant observation and document review. SETTING: The geographical areas covered by two Primary Care Trusts in the north of England and two Local Health Boards in south Wales. PARTICIPANTS: A partnership between 103 members of the public, general practice staff from 19 practices, NHS managers from four Primary Care Organizations and the research team. RESULTS: The public would like to know more about the quality and range of general practice services but current sources of information do not meet their needs. The public do not like league tables comparing the performance of practices and only a small number of people want to use comparative information to choose between practices. They seem to be more interested in the context and availability of services and the willingness of practices to improve, than in the practice's absolute or relative performance. They want to be clear about the source of the information so that they can make personal judgements about its veracity. Information is most likely to be useful if it adheres to the basic principles of cognitive science in terms of its structure, content and presentation format. Using these findings, paper and electronic prototype versions of a guide to general practice services have been developed. CONCLUSIONS: In order to maximize the potential use of performance information by the public it is necessary to move beyond provider-led and professionally constructed approaches to information provision and ensure that the public is actively involved in the development of information sources. Such involvement produces a different kind of information to that currently available to the public. The findings of this study have important implications for policy. Most importantly, it seems that the traditional consumerist model underlying a policy of making comparative performance information available to the public to enable them to exercise choice between primary care providers may not be appropriate. An alternative model of information provision, which recognizes the public's commitment to their practice and is integrated with 'soft' sources of knowledge is more likely to engage and be of use to the public.

England↗

'Dialectical process' and 'constructive method': micro-analysis of relational process in an example from parent-infant psychotherapy.

Jung defined experience that takes place between therapist and patient as 'dialectical process', achieved through 'constructive method'. Perspectives from attachment theory, neurobiology, cognitive science, systems thinking and infancy research confirm and extend his view of the centrality of relational process in the development of self. Interactional experiences are embedded within the history of the primary parent-infant relationship and structure within the mind implicit patterns of relating. These patterns influence capacities for managing a whole lifetime of affective relational experience within the self and with others. This paper shows how parent-infant psychotherapy seeks to intervene during the formation of disturbed relational patterns. I offer detailed micro-analysis of the moment-to-moment 'dialectical process' that a mother, her four-month-old infant and myself 'constructed' together.

Adult↗

Multiple identities and the integration of personality.

Life-history interviews show narrators to shift among multiple, often contradictory self-representations. This article outlines a model that accounts for how a relatively small set of self-symbols and metaphors can form a grammar-like system that simultaneously defines and integrates multiple identities. Drawing on generative theories from linguistics, anthropology, and music, the model proposes that this system provides a unitary deep structure that can be configured in various arrangements to yield multiple surface structures. Each "surface" identity constructs an individual's emotions and social relations--and what he or she accepts as "Me" and rejects as "not-Me"--into a distinct pattern, with identity per se appearing as a dialogic or fugue-like structure of opposed voices. Study-of-lives interviews conducted by the author in urban America and rural Morocco are used to present the model and to demonstrate the pivotal role played by multistable or "structurally ambiguous" symbols in anchoring reversible self-representations which integrate personality as a system of organized contraction. The musical analogy is emphasized in order to build a bridge toward current research in cognitive science and toward efforts to formulate a "state integration" theory of personality development.

Adult↗

The Canadian donor health assessment questionnaire: can it be improved?

BACKGROUND: The donor health assessment questionnaire (DHAQ) plays an important role in ensuring blood safety. The Canadian DHAQ has been developed over many years on an ad hoc basis and has never been evaluated in light of cognitive science principles. In addition, donor attitudes about its mode of administration have not been assessed. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: Between May and August 2005, a total of 456 donors participated in the study by completing the DHAQ, followed by a short, scripted interview assessing recall (as an indicator of attention to the questions) of 17 specific items queried on the DHAQ and attitudes toward interviewer or self-administration of the DHAQ. RESULTS: Overall, 7.5 percent of donors were able to correctly identify all 17 items. Recall was best for questions asked as individual items (87%-99%) and decreased substantially for items that are part of a list (55%-91%). Position effects were demonstrated, with items at the end of a list being the most frequently forgotten. Twenty percent of repeat donors favored the current practice of interviewer administration of high-risk questions, whereas 80 percent were neutral or favored self-administration. CONCLUSION: The current format of the Canadian DHAQ is not optimal for donor attention to specific questions asked as part of a list. The majority of repeat donors are ready for a change in the method of administration of the DHAQ. Studies on donor recall may help guide evidence-based changes to the DHAQ.

Adolescent↗

Toward a model for nursing informatics.

PURPOSE: To propose a new model for the development of nursing informatics based on historical precedent. SIGNIFICANCE: Nursing informatics is expanding rapidly. The proposed model aids in understanding the areas of research, relating them to each other, and it shows areas where work is missing or should be extended. ORGANIZING FRAMEWORK: Nursing informatics as the interaction of cognitive science, computer science, and information science resting on a base of nursing science. IMPLICATIONS: As this model is tested, it can act as an organizing framework to understand and relate studies of nursing informatics and give organization for future research, education, and development.

Computer Communication Networks↗

Ordering of the numerosities 1 to 9 by monkeys.

A fundamental question in cognitive science is whether animals can represent numerosity (a property of a stimulus that is defined by the number of discriminable elements it contains) and use numerical representations computationally. Here, it was shown that rhesus monkeys represent the numerosity of visual stimuli and detect their ordinal disparity. Two monkeys were first trained to respond to exemplars of the numerosities 1 to 4 in an ascending numerical order (1 --> 2 --> 3 --> 4). As a control for non-numerical cues, exemplars were varied with respect to size, shape, and color. The monkeys were later tested, without reward, on their ability to order stimulus pairs composed of the novel numerosities 5 to 9. Both monkeys responded in an ascending order to the novel numerosities. These results show that rhesus monkeys represent the numerosities 1 to 9 on an ordinal scale.

Animals↗

Antecedents of the people and organizational aspects of medical informatics: review of the literature.

People and organizational issues are critical in both implementing medical informatics systems and in dealing with the altered organizations that new systems often create. The people and organizational issues area--like medical informatics itself--is a blend of many disciplines. The academic disciplines of psychology, sociology, social psychology, social anthropology, organizational behavior and organizational development, management, and cognitive sciences are rich with research with significant potential to ease the introduction and on-going use of information technology in today's complex health systems. These academic areas contribute research data and core information for better understanding of such issues as the importance of and processes for creating future direction; managing a complex change process; effective strategies for involving individuals and groups in the informatics effort; and effectively managing the altered organization. This article reviews the behavioral and business referent disciplines that can potentially contribute to improved implementations and on-going management of change in the medical informatics arena.

Attitude to Computers↗

Some radical implications of Bach-y-Rita's discoveries.

Bach-y-Rita's clinical results in restoring lost sensory function are based on several phenomena not widely appreciated in cognitive science. First, there is volume transmission. Extensive laboratory observation has shown that the brain is much more than a network of synaptically connected neurons. Bach-y-Rita has found that a key implication of volume transmission is that it is a functional component in adult brain plasticity, also widely observed experimentally. Plasticity has led him to conclude that the structure of brain dynamics is beyond the scope of algorithmic computation. If the brain is not a computer, this insight would have a significant impact on the development of new technologies based on brain function. Bach-y-Rita's work is being extended from restoration of lost senses to the creation of new senses. This in turn could lead to a new technology of "wiring a human-in-the-loop" that would be utterly unlike any computationally based technology. Instead of mere interaction with a machine, the human "becomes one" with it.

Brain↗

Declarative memory: insights from cognitive neurobiology.

The discovery of declarative memory as distinct from other forms of memory is a major recent achievement in cognitive science. Basic issues about the nature of declarative memory are considered in this review from the perspective of studies on its underlying brain mechanisms. These studies have shown that declarative memory is mediated by a specific brain system including areas of the cerebral cortex and hippocampal region that make distinct functional contributions to memory processing. These processing mechanisms mediate the organization of memories in ways that can support the special properties of declarative or explicit memory expression. Furthermore, the basic properties of declarative memory in human beings can be viewed as evolving from a capacity for organized memory representation and flexible memory expression in animals.

Animals↗

An agenda for research on teaching of physiology.

Calls to reform American medical education have not led to marked changes in the teaching of physiology. In large measure, this is the result of ignorance about how to most effectively teach physiology, a discipline requiring mastery of a complex domain in which the ability to solve problems is essential. However, contemporary cognitive science is beginning to provide us with the needed knowledge. After reviewing some of the key findings in this area, an agenda for research on topics specifically relevant to teaching physiology is proposed.

Models, Theoretical↗

The challenge of neuroscience: psychiatry and phenomenology today.

The paper illustrates the present role of phenomenological psychopathology by outlining its methods and focusing on some of its major issues: embodiment or body scheme, intentionality, time consciousness and intersubjectivity. The application of these categories to the analysis of psychotic disorders is demonstrated. Special emphasis is given to the relationship between phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience, a relationship that has been variously viewed as 'mutual constraint' or as 'mutual enlightenment'. This is where a new cooperation linking phenomenology, psychopathology and cognitive science begins to emerge. Phenomenology offers a methodically developed theory of human subjectivity that is indispensable to any attempt to understand, explore and treat psychiatric disorders.

Forecasting↗

Parallel Visual Information Processing Test. An experimental assessment of alexithymia.

A novel clinical and experimental situation has been created, based on the psychopathological concepts of 'pensée opératoire' and alexithymia and the contribution of recent trends in cognitive science as to the dual skills of the brain hemispheres: the Parallel Visual Information Processing Test. This test was validated in more than 100 subjects, and revealed that holistic visual attention is reduced during logical task performance; this impairment appeared to be typical of patients with poor fantasizing ability and operative behavior. Such findings are consistent with some authors' theory according to which there is a functional commissurotomy in alexithymic and psychosomatic patients.

Adolescent↗

FMRI of past tense processing: the effects of phonological complexity and task difficulty.

The generation of regular and irregular past tense verbs has been an important issue in cognitive science and has been used to advance different models of the organization of language in the brain. The dual-system view holds that the regular past tense forms are generated by a rule while irregular forms are retrieved from memory. The single-system view, on the other hand, holds that both forms are generated by a single integrated system and differ only in their reliance on factors such as phonology and semantics. We conducted an event-related fMRI study to examine the activation patterns associated with the generation and reading of regular and irregular past tense forms, in addition to the reading of their stems. Regular and irregular past tense generation activated similar brain regions compared to the reading of their respective stems. The areas activated more for irregular generation compared to regular generation included inferior frontal, precentral, and parietal regions bilaterally. This activation can be interpreted as reflecting the greater attentional and response selection demands of irregular generation. Compared to irregular generation, regular generation activated a small region in the left superior temporal gyrus when the regular and irregular past tense forms were mismatched on phonological complexity. No areas were more activated for regulars than irregulars when the past tense forms were matched on this variable. This suggests that the activation specific to regulars was related to the higher phonological complexity of their past tense forms rather than to their generation. A contrast of the reading of regular and irregular past tense forms was consistent with this hypothesis. These results support a single-system account of past tense generation.

Adult↗

H.M. revisited: relations between language comprehension, memory, and the hippocampal system.

Three studies tested the claim that H.M. exhibits a "pure memory deficit" that has left his ability to comprehend language unimpaired relative to memory-normal controls. In Study 1, H.M. and memory-normal controls of comparable intelligence, education, and age indicated whether sentences were ambiguous or unambiguous, and H. M. detected ambiguities significantly less often than controls. In Study 2, participants identified the two meanings of visually presented sentences that they knew were ambiguous, and relative to controls, H.M. rarely discovered the ambiguities without help and had difficulty understanding the first meanings, experimenter requests, and his own output. Study 3 replicated these results and showed that they were not due to brain damage per se or to cohort effects: Unlike H.M., a patient with bilateral frontal lobe damage detected the ambiguities as readily as young and same-cohort older controls. These results bear on two general classes of theories in use within a wide range of neurosciences and cognitive sciences: The data favor "distributed-memory theories" that ascribe H.M.'s deficit to semantic-level binding processes that are inherent to both language comprehension and memory, over "stages-of-processing theories," where H.M.'s defective storage processes have no effect on language comprehension.

Adult↗

Emergence of modularity in genotype-phenotype mappings.

A novel evolutionary method that allows us to study the emergence of modularity for genotype-phenotype mapping in the course of Darwinian evolution is described. The method is based on composite epigenotypes with two parts: a binary genotype; and a mapping of genes onto phenotype characters. For such generalized epigenotypes the modularity is determined in the following intuitive way: The genes are divided into two subgroups; simultaneously with this decomposition there is defined an accompanying decomposition of the set of phenotype characters. We expect that for epigenotypes with modular structures the genes from one group will be mapped onto characters from the same group, that is, that the appearance of crosslink mappings will be maximally suppressed. A fundamental question for all of evolutionary biology (and also for evolutionary algorithms and connectionist cognitive science) is the mechanism of evolutionary emergence of modular structures. The presented explanatory model is an implementation of the assumption that variation in genotype is produced on a faster time scale than variation in the genotype-phenotype mapped part. Moreover, the evaluation of the epigenotype in the evolutionary algorithm is based on directly selectable properties (corresponding to the decomposition of the set of phenotype characters). The modularity of genotype-phenotype mapping emerges in the simulations.

Algorithms↗

What is consciousness?

In the past few years scientists and scholars in a variety of disciplines have been making concerted efforts to answer an ancient question, namely, How exactly do the physical processes in the brain cause consciousness? What is distinctive about the way in which modern scientists and scholars are approaching this question is that they are treating it as a scientific problem rather than a metaphysical one. This transition reflects the air of expectation in contemporary cognitive science to the effect that an empirical solution is imminent to a philosophical problem that previously was considered insoluble. Nevertheless, a recent authoritative review of the publications of such leading contemporary workers in the field as Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, and Israel Rosenfield has concluded that they have all failed to provide a satisfactory answer to the question (Searle 1995a). The present paper makes a psychoanalytic contribution to this interdisciplinary effort and provides an alternative answer to the question, based on Freud's conceptualization of the problem of consciousness. The paper takes a concrete example from Searle's review, reanalyses it within Freud's metapsychological frame of reference, and shows how this frame provides a radical solution to the problem. This implication of Freud's work has not hitherto been recognized and so has not received the attention it deserves.

Awareness↗