Activity as an Anthropological Category : On Distinguishing Between the Ontological and the Epistemological Status of Activity

This article is devoted to categorial and logical-semantic analysis of the concept "activity" in philosophy, methodology, and psychology. The basic activity-related subcategories are systematized and the normative structure of activity is revealed. The set of problems pertaining to the ontogenesis of activity-related abilities and to professional formation is defined in terms of the process of establishment of the subject of his own activity.     

The Merits of Unconscious Thought in Rule Detection

According to unconscious thought theory (UTT), unconscious thought is more adept at complex decision-making than is conscious thought. Related research has mainly focused on the complexity of decision-making tasks as determined by the amount of information provided. However, the complexity of the rules generating this information also influences decision making. Therefore, we examined whether unconscious thought facilitates the detection of rules during a complex decision-making task. Participants were presented with two types of letter strings. One type matched a grammatical rule, while the other did not. Participants were then divided into three groups according to whether they made decisions using conscious thought, unconscious thought, or immediate decision. The results demonstrated that the unconscious thought group was more accurate in identifying letter strings that conformed to the grammatical rule than were the conscious thought and immediate decision groups. Moreover, performance of the conscious thought and immediate decision groups was similar. We conclude that unconscious thought facilitates the detection of complex rules, which is consistent with UTT.     

Conscious and Unconscious Memory Systems

The idea that memory is not a single mental faculty has a long and interesting history but became a topic of experimental and biologic inquiry only in the mid-20th century. It is now clear that there are different kinds of memory, which are supported by different brain systems. One major distinction can be drawn between working memory and long-term memory. Long-term memory can be separated into declarative (explicit) memory and a collection of nondeclarative (implicit) forms of memory that include habits, skills, priming, and simple forms of conditioning. These memory systems depend variously on the hippocampus and related structures in the parahippocampal gyrus, as well as on the amygdala, the striatum, cerebellum, and the neocortex. This work recounts the discovery of declarative and nondeclarative memory and then describes the nature of declarative memory, working memory, nondeclarative memory, and the relationship between memory systems.The idea that memory is not a single faculty has a long history. In his Principles of Psychology, William James (1890) wrote separate chapters on memory and habit. Bergson (1910) similarly distinguished between a kind of memory that represents our past and memory that is not representational but nevertheless allows the effect of the past to persist into the present. One finds other antecedents as well. McDougall (1923) wrote about explicit and implicit recognition memory, and Tolman (1948) proposed that there is more than one kind of learning. These early proposals were often expressed as a dichotomy involving two forms of memory. The terminologies differed, but the ideas were similar. Thus, Ryle (1949) distinguished between knowing how and knowing that, and Bruner (1969) identified memory without record and memory with record. Later, the artificial intelligence literature introduced a distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge (Winograd 1975). Yet constructs founded in philosophy and psychology are often abstract and have an uncertain connection to biology, that is, to how the brain actually stores information. History shows that as biological information becomes available about structure and function, understanding becomes more concrete and less dependent on terminology.     

The Brain and the Mechanism of Psychosocial Phenomena

According to classic traditions, general psychology has always linked an intraindividual extrapsychic mechanism, the brain, with the intraindividual mental phenomena it examined. Social psychology, on the other hand, is handicapped by the fact that its world is that of interindividual mental phenomena, a disadvantage revealed by a compelling dilemma: this distinctive branch of psychology either fits into the classic tradition and presents the mechanism of interindividual phenomena in the brains of individuals (separately, if need be) or resigns itself to being unable to accommodate the mechanism level of its investigations to their phenomena level. All this is in spite of the fact that investigations focusing on the connection between the mind and the brain—whether they do so from the point of view of the specialized science or of philosophy—cannot begin to deal with the interindividual variety of spiritual phenomena.     

The Problem of the Unconscious in the Psychological Concept of Set

In the pages of the three-volume anthology The unconscious: Its nature, function, and methods of investigation (Tbilisi, 1978), the following incorrect positions are presented concerning the relationship between the concept of set and the problem of the unconscious: (1) the unconscious is real only as a form of existence of physiological processes; (2) the unconscious is a category whose use is incompatible with dialectical materialist methodology in psychology; and (3) the identity of the concept of set (in D. N. Uznadze's conception) with the psychological concept of the unconscious makes the concept of set superfluous for psychology as an explanatory science (see [3. Vol. 1, p. 74]). Let us examine some aspects of these postulates.     

Unconscious selection and the evolution of domesticated Plants

Two types of selection operate (and complement each other) in plants under domestication: (a) conscious or intentional selection applied by the growers for traits of interest to them; (b) unconscious or automatic selection brought about by the fact that the plants concerned were taken from their original wild habitats and placed in new (and usually very different) human-made or human-managed environments. The shift in the ecology led automatically to drastic changes in selection pressures. Numerous adaptations vital for survival in the wild environments lost their fitness under the new sets of conditions. New traits were automatically selected, resulting in the build-up of characteristic “domestication syndromes,” each fitting the specific agricultural environment provided by the farmer. The present paper assesses the evolutionary consequences of the introduction of the wild plants into several sets of contrasting farming situations. These include: (a) the type of maintenance applied, whether seed planting or vegetative propagation; (b) the plant organs for which the crop has been grown, whether they are reproductive parts or vegetative parts; (c) the impact of the system of tilling, sowing, and reaping on the evolution of grain crops; (d) the impact of the horticultural environment on fruit crops.     

Modeling and Classification of Kinetic Patterns of Dynamic Metabolic Biomarkers in Physical Activity

The objectives of this work were the classification of dynamic metabolic biomarker candidates and the modeling and characterization of kinetic regulatory mechanisms in human metabolism with response to external perturbations by physical activity. Longitudinal metabolic concentration data of 47 individuals from 4 different groups were examined, obtained from a cycle ergometry cohort study. In total, 110 metabolites (within the classes of acylcarnitines, amino acids, and sugars) were measured through a targeted metabolomics approach, combining tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) with the concept of stable isotope dilution (SID) for metabolite quantitation. Biomarker candidates were selected by combined analysis of maximum fold changes (MFCs) in concentrations and P-values resulting from statistical hypothesis testing. Characteristic kinetic signatures were identified through a mathematical modeling approach utilizing polynomial fitting. Modeled kinetic signatures were analyzed for groups with similar behavior by applying hierarchical cluster analysis. Kinetic shape templates were characterized, defining different forms of basic kinetic response patterns, such as sustained, early, late, and other forms, that can be used for metabolite classification. Acetylcarnitine (C2), showing a late response pattern and having the highest values in MFC and statistical significance, was classified as late marker and ranked as strong predictor (MFC = 1.97, P < 0.001). In the class of amino acids, highest values were shown for alanine (MFC = 1.42, P < 0.001), classified as late marker and strong predictor. Glucose yields a delayed response pattern, similar to a hockey stick function, being classified as delayed marker and ranked as moderate predictor (MFC = 1.32, P < 0.001). These findings coincide with existing knowledge on central metabolic pathways affected in exercise physiology, such as β-oxidation of fatty acids, glycolysis, and glycogenolysis. The presented modeling approach demonstrates high potential for dynamic biomarker identification and the investigation of kinetic mechanisms in disease or pharmacodynamics studies using MS data from longitudinal cohort studies.     

Interference between Conscious and Unconscious Facial Expression Information

There is ample evidence to show that many types of visual information, including emotional information, could be processed in the absence of visual awareness. For example, it has been shown that masked subliminal facial expressions can induce priming and adaptation effects. However, stimulus made invisible in different ways could be processed to different extent and have differential effects. In this study, we adopted a flanker type behavioral method to investigate whether a flanker rendered invisible through Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) could induce a congruency effect on the discrimination of a visible target. Specifically, during the experiment, participants judged the expression (either happy or fearful) of a visible face in the presence of a nearby invisible face (with happy or fearful expression). Results show that participants were slower and less accurate in discriminating the expression of the visible face when the expression of the invisible flanker face was incongruent. Thus, facial expression information rendered invisible with CFS and presented a different spatial location could enhance or interfere with consciously processed facial expression information.