What are you doing? How active and observational experience shape infants' action understanding

From early in life, infants watch other people''s actions. How do young infants come to make sense of actions they observe? Here, we review empirical findings on the development of action understanding in infancy. Based on this review, we argue that active action experience is crucial for infants'' developing action understanding. When infants execute actions, they form associations between motor acts and the sensory consequences of these acts. When infants subsequently observe these actions in others, they can use their motor system to predict the outcome of the ongoing actions. Also, infants come to an understanding of others’ actions through the repeated observation of actions and the effects associated with them. In their daily lives, infants have plenty of opportunities to form associations between observed events and learn about statistical regularities of others’ behaviours. We argue that based on these two forms of experience—active action experience and observational experience—infants gradually develop more complex action understanding capabilities.     

The Autonomic Signature of Guilt in Children: A Thermal Infrared Imaging Study

So far inferences on early moral development and higher order self conscious emotions have mostly been based on behavioral data. Emotions though, as far as arguments support, are multidimensional notions. Not only do they involve behavioral actions upon perception of an event, but they also carry autonomic physiological markers. The current study aimed to examine and characterise physiological signs that underlie self-conscious emotions in early childhood, while grounding them on behavioral analyses. For this purpose, the “mishap paradigm” was used as the most reliable method for evoking feelings of “guilt” in children and autonomic facial temperature variation were detected by functional Infrared Imaging (fIRI). Fifteen children (age: 39–42 months) participated in the study. They were asked to play with a toy, falsely informed that it was the experimenter''s “favourite”, while being unaware that it was pre-planned to break. Mishap of the toy during engagement caused sympathetic arousal as shown by peripheral nasal vasoconstriction leading to a marked temperature drop, compared to baseline. Soothing after the mishap phase induced an increase in nose temperature, associated with parasympathetic activity suggesting that the child''s distress was neutralized, or even overcompensated. Behavioral analyses reported signs of distress evoked by the paradigm, backing up the thermal observation. The results suggest that the integration of physiological elements should be crucial in research concerning socio-emotional development. fIRI is a non invasive and non contact method providing a powerful tool for inferring early moral emotional signs based on physiological observations of peripheral vasoconstriction, while preserving an ecological and natural context.     

Do You Really Want to Know? Elementary Music Personnel and Potential in Utah

This is the second of two articles reporting the results of a study by the author regarding the status of elementary music education in the state of Utah. This article focuses on the qualifications of Utah's elementary music teachers (music certified, elementary classroom certified, artists-in-residence, volunteers, and paraprofessionals) and the conditions under which they teach. Interactions among teacher qualifications and teaching status are explored. Paraprofessionals play a significant role in Utah's elementary music programs. While over 90 percent of elementary schools in the United States provide regular music instruction taught by certified music specialists, less than 10 percent of Utah's elementary population receives such instruction. Nearly half of the elementary students in the state receive no designated music instruction beyond that provided by their regular elementary classroom teacher. The influence of school funding, No Child Left Behind and other accountability measures, high-stakes testing, urban/rural populations, and leadership are highlighted. Policy considerations are discussed.     

The scope and limits of overimitation in the transmission of artefact culture

Children are generally masterful imitators, both rational and flexible in their reproduction of others'' actions. After observing an adult operating an unfamiliar object, however, young children will frequently overimitate, reproducing not only the actions that were causally necessary but also those that were clearly superfluous. Why does overimitation occur? We argue that when children observe an adult intentionally acting on a novel object, they may automatically encode all of the adult''s actions as causally meaningful. This process of automatic causal encoding (ACE) would generally guide children to accurate beliefs about even highly opaque objects. In situations where some of an adult''s intentional actions were unnecessary, however, it would also lead to persistent overimitation. Here, we undertake a thorough examination of the ACE hypothesis, reviewing prior evidence and offering three new experiments to further test the theory. We show that children will persist in overimitating even when doing so is costly (underscoring the involuntary nature of the effect), but also that the effect is constrained by intentionality in a manner consistent with its posited learning function. Overimitation may illuminate not only the structure of children''s causal understanding, but also the social learning processes that support our species'' artefact-centric culture.     

Source monitoring and memory distortion.

Memory distortion reflects failures to identify the sources of mental experience (reality monitoring failures or source misattributions). For example, people sometimes confuse what they inferred or imagined and what actually happened, what they saw and what was suggested to them, one person''s actions and another''s what they heard and what they previously knew, and fiction and fact. Source confusions arise because activated information is incomplete or ambiguous and the evaluative processes responsible for attributing information to sources are imperfect. Both accurate and inaccurate source attributions result from heuristic processes and more reflectively complex processes that evaluate a mental experience for various qualities such as amount and type of perceptual, contextual, affective, semantic and cognitive detail, that retrieve additional supporting or disconfirming evidence, and that evaluate plausibility and consistency given general knowledge, schemes, biases and goals. Experimental and clinical evidence regarding cognitive mechanisms and underlying brain structures of source monitoring are discussed.     

The influence of goal demotion on children's reproduction of ritual behavior

Rituals are a ubiquitous feature of human behavior, yet we know little about the cognitive mechanisms that enable children to recognize them and respond accordingly. In this study, 3 to 6 year old children living in Bushman communities in South Africa were shown a sequence of causally irrelevant actions that differed in the extent to which goal demotion was a feature. The children consistently replicated the causally irrelevant actions but when such actions were also fully goal demoted they were reproduced at significantly higher rates. These findings highlight how causal opacity and goal demotion work in tandem to demarcate actions as being ritualistic, and specifically, how goal demotion uniquely influences the reproduction of ritualistic actions.     

Actions,Action Sequences and Habits: Evidence That Goal-Directed and Habitual Action Control Are Hierarchically Organized

Behavioral evidence suggests that instrumental conditioning is governed by two forms of action control: a goal-directed and a habit learning process. Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has been argued to underlie the goal-directed process; however, the way in which it interacts with habits and the structure of the habitual process has remained unclear. According to a flat architecture, the habitual process corresponds to model-free RL, and its interaction with the goal-directed process is coordinated by an external arbitration mechanism. Alternatively, the interaction between these systems has recently been argued to be hierarchical, such that the formation of action sequences underlies habit learning and a goal-directed process selects between goal-directed actions and habitual sequences of actions to reach the goal. Here we used a two-stage decision-making task to test predictions from these accounts. The hierarchical account predicts that, because they are tied to each other as an action sequence, selecting a habitual action in the first stage will be followed by a habitual action in the second stage, whereas the flat account predicts that the statuses of the first and second stage actions are independent of each other. We found, based on subjects'' choices and reaction times, that human subjects combined single actions to build action sequences and that the formation of such action sequences was sufficient to explain habitual actions. Furthermore, based on Bayesian model comparison, a family of hierarchical RL models, assuming a hierarchical interaction between habit and goal-directed processes, provided a better fit of the subjects'' behavior than a family of flat models. Although these findings do not rule out all possible model-free accounts of instrumental conditioning, they do show such accounts are not necessary to explain habitual actions and provide a new basis for understanding how goal-directed and habitual action control interact.     

Microglia: Activation in acute and chronic inflammatory states and in response to cardiovascular dysfunction

Microglia are the resident immune cells in the central nervous system and are constantly monitoring their environment. After an insult, they are activated and secrete both pro- and anti-inflammatory mediators. Thus, they can have both detrimental and protective actions. Microglia are activated in many conditions that involve chronic inflammation such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and in neuropathic pain. Following cerebral ischemia and stroke, microglia are activated and acutely contribute to neuronal loss and infarct damage. Chronically, in this condition, neuroprotective actions of activated microglia include clearance of the dead cells and secretion of neurotrophins. Of great interest is the recent observation that following myocardial infarction, there is increased inflammation within the hypothalamus and a marked increase in activated microglia.     

The Gender of the Joke: Intimacy and Marginality in Murri Humour

ABSTRACT

Murri Aboriginal humour performances are expressive events in which bodily experiences of policing and agency are discursively commented on in ways that expose Australia's naturalised rationalisations of indigenous governance. Drawing on the ‘out-of-the-way’ position of an indigenous minority encapsulated in the body of the nation-state and the Murri body's intimate ‘out-of-the-way’ folds and crannies, Murri humour delimits and mocks the marginal location Murri people are imagined to spatially and morally occupy within Australia. This work examines how gendered humour renders the Murri individual and social body legible to and for a Murri audience. Such humour performances engage the local and the global, the modern and the traditional, and the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic in ways that link intimacy, bodies and embodiments to these macro-processes. Unraveling such binaries produces a nuanced analysis in which embodied social actions and sly social critique are captured as they are experienced and expressed through humour.     

Know Thy Neighbor: Costly Information Can Hurt Cooperation in Dynamic Networks

People need to rely on cooperation with other individuals in many aspects of everyday life, such as teamwork and economic exchange in anonymous markets. We study whether and how the ability to make or break links in social networks fosters cooperate, paying particular attention to whether information on an individual''s actions is freely available to potential partners. Studying the role of information is relevant as information on other people''s actions is often not available for free: a recruiting firm may need to call a job candidate''s references, a bank may need to find out about the credit history of a new client, etc. We find that people cooperate almost fully when information on their actions is freely available to their potential partners. Cooperation is less likely, however, if people have to pay about half of what they gain from cooperating with a cooperator. Cooperation declines even further if people have to pay a cost that is almost equivalent to the gain from cooperating with a cooperator. Thus, costly information on potential neighbors'' actions can undermine the incentive to cooperate in fluid networks.     

Problems of Visual Culture in the Light of Modern Investigations of Visual Perception and Visual Thinking

The problem of visual and esthetic training has many facets, among which the psychological are obviously not the least important. The results of long years of studying the psychology of the child (2) lead to the conclusion that:

Human consciousness and the mechanisms of conscious control of human actions represe it a hierarchical system, like a building constructed of many superimposed psychophysiological levels, of many floors rising above one another. Somewhere in the basement are the prepsychological instinctive processes of receiving and using unconditioned reflex signals; the lower floors form the elementary sensations and implement the elementary types of individually discovered sensorimotor coordinations; the next floor is where the synthetic perceptions of space and time are formed along with the mechanisms for controlling locomotion and object manipulation; above them is the floor housing visual thinking and the processes for regulating play and productive activities; and, finally, above all these is the floor of symbolic, abstract, logical operations and the most complex instances of control exerted by the most complex information- seeking and labor activities. It should be emphasized that in its developed form this hierarchical system operates as a single entity, and the control of complex operations requires agreement between the operations of the psychophysiological mechanisms located at all these levels or floors. Each age level in the child's development erects the next floor of the overall psychophysiological building, and our task is mainly to build it in the best possible way, without senseless haste and taking heed not to erect the next floor before the one below is finished. (4)     

The scientific board.

This summary is published so that CMA membership may be advised in brief of the actions of the Association''s Council. It covers only major actions and is not intended as a detailed report. Full minutes of these meetings are available upon any member''s request to the CMA office.     

Making Smart Social Judgments Takes Time: Infants' Recruitment of Goal Information When Generating Action Predictions

Previous research has shown that young infants perceive others'' actions as structured by goals. One open question is whether the recruitment of this understanding when predicting others'' actions imposes a cognitive challenge for young infants. The current study explored infants'' ability to utilize their knowledge of others'' goals to rapidly predict future behavior in complex social environments and distinguish goal-directed actions from other kinds of movements. Fifteen-month-olds (N = 40) viewed videos of an actor engaged in either a goal-directed (grasping) or an ambiguous (brushing the back of her hand) action on a Tobii eye-tracker. At test, critical elements of the scene were changed and infants'' predictive fixations were examined to determine whether they relied on goal information to anticipate the actor''s future behavior. Results revealed that infants reliably generated goal-based visual predictions for the grasping action, but not for the back-of-hand behavior. Moreover, response latencies were longer for goal-based predictions than for location-based predictions, suggesting that goal-based predictions are cognitively taxing. Analyses of areas of interest indicated that heightened attention to the overall scene, as opposed to specific patterns of attention, was the critical indicator of successful judgments regarding an actor''s future goal-directed behavior. These findings shed light on the processes that support “smart” social behavior in infants, as it may be a challenge for young infants to use information about others'' intentions to inform rapid predictions.     

Running in the real world: adjusting leg stiffness for different surfaces.

A running animal coordinates the actions of many muscles, tendons, and ligaments in its leg so that the overall leg behaves like a single mechanical spring during ground contact. Experimental observations have revealed that an animal''s leg stiffness is independent of both speed and gravity level, suggesting that it is dictated by inherent musculoskeletal properties. However, if leg stiffness was invariant, the biomechanics of running (e.g. peak ground reaction force and ground contact time) would change when an animal encountered different surfaces in the natural world. We found that human runners adjust their leg stiffness to accommodate changes in surface stiffness, allowing them to maintain similar running mechanics on different surfaces. These results provide important insight into mechanics and control of animal locomotion and suggest that incorporating an adjustable leg stiffness in the design of hopping and running robots is important if they are to match the agility and speed of animals on varied terrain.     

The uses of racism: whitewashing new Europeans in the UK

In many respects, recent East European migrants in the UK look like past migrants to the UK: they left poorer parts of the world in search of work and the better life in the UK. But in other respects, they look different: they are white. Their putative whiteness, however, has not exempted them from the effects of racism. But while there is growing evidence of how they have been targets of racism, less attention has been focused on how they are also perpetrators of racism. The purpose of this paper is to compare the ways Hungarians and Romanians wield ‘race’ to assert and defend the relatively privileged position their putative whiteness affords them in the UK's segmented labour market. I argue that these migrants mark, evaluate and rank difference in racialized ways to secure both social-psychological and material benefits.     

The second-agent effect: communicative gestures increase the likelihood of perceiving a second agent

Background

Beyond providing cues about an agent''s intention, communicative actions convey information about the presence of a second agent towards whom the action is directed (second-agent information). In two psychophysical studies we investigated whether the perceptual system makes use of this information to infer the presence of a second agent when dealing with impoverished and/or noisy sensory input.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Participants observed point-light displays of two agents (A and B) performing separate actions. In the Communicative condition, agent B''s action was performed in response to a communicative gesture by agent A. In the Individual condition, agent A''s communicative action was replaced with a non-communicative action. Participants performed a simultaneous masking yes-no task, in which they were asked to detect the presence of agent B. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether criterion c was lowered in the Communicative condition compared to the Individual condition, thus reflecting a variation in perceptual expectations. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the congruence between A''s communicative gesture and B''s response, to ascertain whether the lowering of c in the Communicative condition reflected a truly perceptual effect. Results demonstrate that information extracted from communicative gestures influences the concurrent processing of biological motion by prompting perception of a second agent (second-agent effect).

Conclusions/Significance

We propose that this finding is best explained within a Bayesian framework, which gives a powerful rationale for the pervasive role of prior expectations in visual perception.     

Secreted frizzled related protein 4 (sFRP4) update: A brief review

Secreted frizzled-related proteins control a multitude of biological phenomena throughout development and adult life in humans. In parallel, aberrant gene expression and abnormal secreted protein levels accompany a wide range of pathologies in humans. In this review, we provide a brief introduction to sFRP4, an update of the pathways it's involved, its various physiological actions that are reported to contribute to diseases, outlining the importance of its wider research and specific modulation by pharmacologic interventions. First recognized as a novel molecule that co-purified with a disparate protein, its identity was based on its sequence homology to the frizzled receptors. Once multiple members of the family were cloned, their genetic loci, tissue and subcellular distributions were located. Nucleotide and amino acid sequences were characterized and homology to different organisms was found to be present that helped elucidate their actions. Following subsequent experimental studies, they were found to be secreted proteins with an affinity to bind to the Wnt ligands, participating in different developmental and adult homeostatic pathways by the virtue of their regulatory function to the Wnt signal transduction system. Secreted frizzled related protein 4 has garnered considerable attention in the recent years following breakthrough discoveries implicating them in the pathogenesis of various diseases. Studies investigating them can provide information not only regarding their association with a disease but can also help use them as potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets.     

Favouritism in the motor system: social interaction modulates action simulation

The ability to anticipate others'' actions is crucial for social interaction. It has been shown that this ability relies on motor areas of the human brain that are not only active during action execution and action observation, but also during anticipation of another person''s action. Recording electroencephalograms during a triadic social interaction, we assessed whether activation of motor areas pertaining to the human mirror-neuron system prior to action observation depends on the social relationship between the actor and the observer. Anticipatory motor activation was stronger when participants expected an interaction partner to perform a particular action than when they anticipated that the same action would be performed by a third person they did not interact with. These results demonstrate that social interaction modulates action simulation.     

Council Highlights: Minutes of the 560th Meeting of the Council

This summary is published so that CMA membership may be advised in brief of the actions of the Association''s Council. It covers only major actions and is not intended as a detailed report. Full minutes of these meetings are available upon any member''s request to the CMA office.     

A Politics of Ontology: Continuities and Discontinuities

They wait, then they swoop. At whoever is to get the shoe-garland. One will try to sling it around that person's neck. The others will help if it falls. But they will have to move quickly if they are to manage to get the string of dirty sandals and shoes around the man's shoulders before he can stop them. One will try to put soot on the victim's face… Then they will rush from the place.