Glossary of Terms Frequently Encountered in Soviet Psychology

Numerous terms are used in Soviet psychology, the direct translation of which may be misleading to American psychologists because they are habitually used in a different sense from that familiar to Western psychology. For example, righteous indignation has been vented by Western psychologists over the "Russian preoccupation" with interpreting all behavior in terms of Pavlovian reflexes. To the Russian psychologist, the word refleks is no more a specific term than the word "response" is to an American psychologist. Its use does not imply the classical Pavlovian conditioning paradigm. Since interpreters are not necessarily aware that the cognates are not synonymous, it is worthwhile for any Western psychologist to become aware of the most common and easy sources of terminological confusion. The following is a glossary of terms which are so familiar to the Russian psychologist that he will seldom stop to explain them. Most of them are cognates. Some are synonymous with their usual English translations; many are not.     

Finding autophagy

To tell the truth, I find it difficult to work when flying, or even when sitting in an airport for an extended period of time. So, typically I take along a book to read. And when I truly cannot concentrate, for example when a flight is considerably delayed, I have even been known to resort to word puzzles. Depending on the type, they do not require much attention (that is, you can pick up right where you left off after you glance at the flight status screen for the twentieth or so time, even though you know nothing has changed), or effort (although you need to use a pen or pencil, not a keyboard), but nonetheless they can keep your mind somewhat occupied. I even rationalize doing them based on the assumption that they are sharpening my observational/pattern-finding skills. One type of word puzzle that is particularly mindless, but for that very reason I still enjoy in the above circumstances, is a word search; you are given a grid with letters and/or numbers, and a list of “hidden” terms, and you circle them within the grid, crossing them off the list as you go along. I do admit that the categories of terms used in the typical word searches can become rather mundane (breeds of dog, types of food, words that are followed by “stone,” words associated with a famous movie star, words from a particular television show, etc.). Therefore, on one of my last seminar trips I decided to generate my own word search, using the category of autophagy.     

Finding autophagy: It’s a question of how you look at it

To tell the truth, I find it difficult to work when flying, or even when sitting in an airport for an extended period of time. So, typically I take along a book to read. And when I truly cannot concentrate, for example when a flight is considerably delayed, I have even been known to resort to word puzzles. Depending on the type, they do not require much attention (that is, you can pick up right where you left off after you glance at the flight status screen for the twentieth or so time, even though you know nothing has changed), or effort (although you need to use a pen or pencil, not a keyboard), but nonetheless they can keep your mind somewhat occupied. I even rationalize doing them based on the assumption that they are sharpening my observational/pattern-finding skills. One type of word puzzle that is particularly mindless, but for that very reason I still enjoy in the above circumstances, is a word search; you are given a grid with letters and/or numbers, and a list of “hidden” terms, and you circle them within the grid, crossing them off the list as you go along. I do admit that the categories of terms used in the typical word searches can become rather mundane (breeds of dog, types of food, words that are followed by “stone,” words associated with a famous movie star, words from a particular television show, etc.). Therefore, on one of my last seminar trips I decided to generate my own word search, using the category of autophagy.     

Iconicity in English and Spanish and Its Relation to Lexical Category and Age of Acquisition

Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between iconicity ratings and age of acquisition. Words learned earlier tended to be more iconic, suggesting that iconicity in early vocabulary may aid word learning. Altogether these findings show that iconicity is a graded quality that pervades vocabularies of even the most “arbitrary” spoken languages. The findings provide compelling evidence that iconicity is an important property of all languages, signed and spoken, including Indo-European languages.     

Rethinking Anthropological Studies of the Body: Manas and Bōdham in Kerala

Anthropological research that focuses on the body has been prolific in the last two decades. This trend has provided an important reorientation away from a tendency to focus on mental representations of experience and has allowed for a more holistic understanding of the human condition. However, this article argues that much research on the body has created a false dichotomy: Westerners are seen as living in a world of mentalistic bias and mind–body dualism while all others are understood as more grounded in their bodies. Ethnographic research conducted among people suffering psychopathology and possession in Kerala, India, challenges these assumptions about the embodied Other by showing that these patients experience a continuum of states of being that includes the body, mind, consciousness, and self/soul. This approach demonstrates how an examination of a local culturally and historically formed phenomenological orientation can provide a useful alternative to the tendency to discover embodied peoples. [Keywords: body, embodiment, India, Kerala]     

Self-awareness and the emergence of mind in primates

To date humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans are the only species which have been shown capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors. Several species of macaques have now been provided with years of continuous exposure to mirrors, but they still persist in reacting to their reflection as if they were seeing other monkeys. Even gibbons (apes) and gorillas (great apes) seem incapable of learning that their behavior is the source of the behavior depicted in the image. Most primates, therefore, appear to lack a cognitive category for processing mirrored information about themselves. The implications of these data for traditional views of consciousness are considered briefly, and a recent attempt to develop an operant analog to self-recognition is critically evaluated. Finally, an attempt is made to show that self-awareness, consciousness, and mind are not mutually exclusive cognitive categories and that the emergence of self-awareness may be equivalent to the emergence of mind. Several indices of “mind” which can be applied to nonhuman species are discussed in the context of an attempt to develop a comparative psychology of mind.     

Religious and secular death: a parting of the ways

Most organized religions have indicated a level of support for organ donation including the diagnosis of death by the brain criterion. Organ donation is seen as a gift of love and fits within a communitarian ethos that most religions embrace. The acceptance of the determination of death by the brain criterion, where it has been explained, is reconciled with religious views of soul and body by using a notion of integration. Because the soul may be seen as that which integrates the human body, in the absence of any other signs of human functioning, loss of integration is considered to be an indication that soul and body have separated. To some extent this view would seem to be informed by an Aristotelian notion of the soul, but it fits well enough with religious notions of the person continuing after death. There have been several developments internationally that indicate that the acceptance of so-called 'brain death' by organized religions has been challenged by new developments including the acceptance of a lesser standard than loss of all brain function and a rejection by the US President's Council on Bioethics of the notion of loss of integration as an explanation of death by the brain criterion.     

Clausal order and the acquisition of Dutch deverbal compounds

The purpose of this study was to explore how Dutch-speaking children acquire deverbal compounds, particularly in ordering verbs and nouns. English-speaking children form compounds like bottle breaker around 5–6 years of age and make noun-verb reversal errors at younger ages. These errors have been attributed to clausal ordering. Dutch allows more variations in clausal ordering, so Dutch-speaking children might acquire deverbal compounds differently from English-speaking children. In Study 1, we examined the input to a Dutch-speaking child between 4;8 and 5;2 and her compound acquisition. She heard a variety of clausal orderings, mostly with verbs before objects, and her deverbal compounds were already well acquired. In Study 2, we tested 24 Dutch-speaking preschool children’s production and comprehension of novel compounds. They produced many of the same forms as have been reported for English-speaking children, making reversal errors at around the same age. In Study 3, we compared a subset of the Dutch-speaking children with age-matched English monolingual children. We found a slight advantage for the Dutch-speaking children on production but no difference on comprehension. We argue that children’s ordering errors with OV-er compounds are not due to clausal word order but to ordering of other complex word forms.     

Mystery of mysteries: Darwin and the species problem

Darwin offered an intriguing answer to the species problem. He doubted the existence of the species category as a real category in nature, but he did not doubt the existence of those taxa called “species”. And despite his scepticism of the species category, Darwin continued using the word “species”. Many have said that Darwin did not understand the nature of species. Yet his answer to the species problem is both theoretically sound and practical. On the theoretical side, Darwin’s answer is confirmed by contemporary biology, and it offers a more satisfactory answer to the species problem than recent attempts to save the species category. On the practical side, Darwin’s answer frees us from the search for the correct theoretical definition of “species”. But at the same time it does not require that we banish the word “species” from biology as some recent sceptics of the species category advocate. © The Willi Hennig Society 2010.     

Lewis Carroll's Doublets Net of English Words: Network Heterogeneity in a Complex System

Lewis Carroll''s English word game Doublets is represented as a system of networks with each node being an English word and each connectivity edge confirming that its two ending words are equal in letter length, but different by exactly one letter. We show that this system, which we call the Doublets net, constitutes a complex body of linguistic knowledge concerning English word structure that has computable multiscale features. Distributed morphological, phonological and orthographic constraints and the language''s local redundancy are seen at the node level. Phonological communities are seen at the network level. And a balancing act between the language''s global efficiency and redundancy is seen at the system level. We develop a new measure of intrinsic node-to-node distance and a computational algorithm, called community geometry, which reveal the implicit multiscale structure within binary networks. Because the Doublets net is a modular complex cognitive system, the community geometry and computable multi-scale structural information may provide a foundation for understanding computational learning in many systems whose network structure has yet to be fully analyzed.     

Coming to terms with heritability

The complex mechanisms of heredity are little appreciated by non-specialists, in some measure, because of misunderstandings that are perpetuated when words used for technical terms have other, more widely understood, folk meanings. When a word has both technical and folk meanings, it is the responsibility of the specialist to avoid promoting confusion by either using extremely cautious and precise language when using the term or, in cases when confusion is inevitable, abandoning the term in favor of one without a widely understood folk meaning. The study of heredity is beset by such confusion, and the term heritability appears to be at the heart of some of the confusion. In this article, I discuss both the technical and folk meanings of heritability and examine the bridge between them. By continuing to use the term heritability, we risk promulgating serious misunderstanding about the workings of heredity, therefore I suggest selectability as an alternative term to avoid such pitfalls. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Involuntary autobiographical memories and their relation to other forms of spontaneous thoughts

Involuntary autobiographical memories are memories of personal events that come to mind spontaneously—that is, with no conscious initiation of the retrieval process. Such spontaneously arising memories were long ignored in cognitive psychology, which generally has focused on controlled and strategic forms of remembering, studied in laboratory settings. Recent evidence shows that involuntary memories of past events are highly frequent in daily life, and that they represent a context-sensitive, and associative way of recollecting past events that involves little executive control. They operate by constraints that favour recent events and events with a distinct feature overlap to the current situation, which optimizes the probability of functional relevance to the ongoing situation. In addition to adults, they are documented in young children and great apes and may be an ontogenetic and evolutionary forerunner of strategic retrieval of past events. Findings suggest that intrusive involuntary memories observed clinically after traumatic events should be viewed as a dysfunctional subclass of otherwise functional involuntary autobiographical memories. Because of their highly constrained, situation-dependent and automatic nature, involuntary autobiographical memories form a distinct category of spontaneous thought that cannot be equated with mind wandering.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Offline perception: voluntary and spontaneous perceptual experiences without matching external stimulation’.     

The root and word distinction: an experimental study of Hebrew denominal verbs

The morpho-syntactic structure of Semitic languages, traditionally seen as based on abstract root morphemes, has been analysed by some as being fully word based. Others have proposed a root-based system which allows for word-based derivation as well. A distinction between word-based and root-based morpho-syntactic derivations has previously been posited in both morpho-syntactic and lexical semantic literature. Under this distinction the semantic and phonological access to a root morpheme during morpho-syntactic construction is fully available in a root-based derivation, but is restricted by the category bearing head in a word-based derivation. However, there has to date been no behavioural evidence for the distinction, and it is by no means universally accepted that words are morphemically decomposable into root morphemes. The current study utilized a masked priming experimental paradigm of word recognition in an attempt to differentiate root-based derivation from word-based derivation in Hebrew, proposing an analogy between availability under Marantz (2000) and Arad (2003), and linkage within the mental lexicon model under Frost et al. (2005). The results strongly support the proposed analogy, and the cognitive reality of the root morpheme as the basis of Hebrew morphological derivation. In addition they provide a first experimental verification of the theoretically motivated distinction between root derivation and word derivation.     

植物区系地理学重要术语“分布区类型”的英译问题

自1991年以来,我国植物区系地理学文献中的“分布区类型”一词广泛英译为“areal type”。这一译法从英语语言上来说是错误的,可能自德文“Arealtyp”一词生造而出。 “分布区类型”以译为“area type”或“distribution type” 为宜。     

Automata, Living and Non-Living: Descartes' Mechanical Biology and His Criteria for Life

Despite holding to the essential distinction between mind and body, Descartes did not adopt a life-body dualism. Though humans are the only creatures which can reason, as they are the only creatures whose body is in an intimate union with a soul, they are not the only finite beings who are alive. In the present note, I attempt to determine Descartes' criteria for something to be 'living.' Though certain passages associate such a principle with the presence of a properly functioning heart, I show that there are important reasons for also understanding life in terms of a degree of complexity of design.     

Argument Structure and Morphological Factors in Noun and Verb Processing: An fMRI Study

In a functional MRI (fMRI) study, we have investigated the grammatical categories of object noun, event noun and verb in order to assess the cortical regions of activation supporting their processing. Twelve Italian healthy participants performed a lexical decision task. They had to decide whether a string was an Italian word or not. Words could be objects like medaglia (medal), or events like the noun pianto (cry); or the verb dormire (to sleep). Noun and verb comparison shows differences in regions of activation in the left Inferior Frontal cortex and in the extent of the same areas. We have found specific areas of activation for object noun, and similarities in the pattern of activation for event noun and verb. The activations induced by pseudowords highly resembled the areas activated by the corresponding word category. The implications of the results are discussed in light of the recent debate on the role of grammatical category in the brain.     

Language abilities of motor cortex

A new exploration of the cortical network underlying our language abilities by Hauk et al., in this issue of Neuron, shows that the process of giving meaning to words differentially activates the motor cortex according to the semantic category of the word.     

The emergence of Nervennahrung: Nerves, mind and metabolism in the long eighteenth century

Morphological assumptions concerning the form, structure and internal life of the brain and nervous system profoundly influenced contemporary physiological concepts about nerve actions throughout the 'long eighteenth century'. This article investigates some early theories of mind and metabolism. In a bottom-up fashion, it asks how eighteenth-century theories regarding the physiological actions of the body organs shaped the conceptions of the structure of the brain and nervous tissue themselves. These proposed that a healthy Nervennahrung (the German word for 'nerve nutrition', which might be rendered as brain food in modern English), not only guaranteed the integrity and stability of neuronal structures in the body, but also explained the complex texture of the brain and spinal cord in physiological terms. Eighteenth-century nerve theories already embodied a Leitmotiv of neurology and brain psychiatry from the later nineteenth century: 'Without phosphorus there is no thought!'     

Alignment-free sequence comparison-a review

MOTIVATION: Genetic recombination and, in particular, genetic shuffling are at odds with sequence comparison by alignment, which assumes conservation of contiguity between homologous segments. A variety of theoretical foundations are being used to derive alignment-free methods that overcome this limitation. The formulation of alternative metrics for dissimilarity between sequences and their algorithmic implementations are reviewed. RESULTS: The overwhelming majority of work on alignment-free sequence has taken place in the past two decades, with most reports published in the past 5 years. Two main categories of methods have been proposed-methods based on word (oligomer) frequency, and methods that do not require resolving the sequence with fixed word length segments. The first category is based on the statistics of word frequency, on the distances defined in a Cartesian space defined by the frequency vectors, and on the information content of frequency distribution. The second category includes the use of Kolmogorov complexity and Chaos Theory. Despite their low visibility, alignment-free metrics are in fact already widely used as pre-selection filters for alignment-based querying of large applications. Recent work is furthering their usage as a scale-independent methodology that is capable of recognizing homology when loss of contiguity is beyond the possibility of alignment. Availability: Most of the alignment-free algorithms reviewed were implemented in MATLAB code and are available at http://bioinformatics.musc.edu/resources.html     

Zipf's law in phonograms and Weibull distribution in ideograms: comparison of English with Japanese

Frequency distribution of word usage in a word sequence generated by capping is estimated in terms of the number of "hits" in retrieval of web-pages, to evaluate structure of semantics proper not to a particular text but to a language. Especially we compare distribution of English sequences with Japanese ones and obtain that, for English and Japanese phonogram, frequency of word usage against rank follows power-law function with exponent 1 and, for Japanese ideogram, it follows stretched exponential (Weibull distribution) function. We also discuss that such a difference can result from difference of phonogram based- (English) and ideogram-based language (Japanese).