2. Personality Factors in Perception

2. Personality Factors in Perception The role of personality factors is no less significant in the process of perception. From the theoretical positions of L. S. Vygotsky, A. R. Luria, and A. V. Zaporozhets it follows that the development of perception is determined by new tasks that arise during ontogenesis. Perception advances as perceptual actions develop that manifest the subject's activity (B. C. Anan'yev, 1960; Yu. B. Gippenreiter, 1958; J. Piaget, 1961; L. A. Venger, 1969; A. V. Zaporozhets, 1960; V. P. Zinchenko, 1967). The cited works show how perceptual actions develop and examine their role in constructing an image. They enumerate the developmental stages of perceptual actions and their orienting and regulating functions. The skill and operations that constitute perceptual actions, the child's perceptual development, and the methods for studying the level of perceptual development have all been researched by L. A. Venger (1969).* All of these works characteristically approach perception as an activity that includes a basic feature of the human mind, namely, its selectivity (A. N. Leont'yev).     

关于在神经外科实习教学中采用Web-CPBL教学模式的探讨

在医学生临床实习带教过程中,神经外科实习教学由于其教学内容具有专业性强、信息量大、知识更新快的特点,与其它专业相比更具难度,教学效果往往难达到预期水平。Web-CPBL教学模式,是将传统的PBL教学理念与网络信息技术有机融合,延伸和发展出的一种新型教学模式。在神经外科实习教学中,巧妙得当的借力于网络资源平台,有助于打破临床师资缺乏、实操场地不足的局限,能更充分的发挥PBL教学的优势。此模式在培养和锻炼医学生临床思维能力的同时,也帮助他们尽早养成主动学习、善于协作、乐于共享的良好学习习惯,提高其医学人文素养。     

The Highly Conserved Bacterial RNase YbeY Is Essential in Vibrio cholerae,Playing a Critical Role in Virulence,Stress Regulation,and RNA Processing

YbeY, a highly conserved protein, is an RNase in E. coli and plays key roles in both processing of the critical 3′ end of 16 S rRNA and in 70 S ribosome quality control under stress. These central roles account for YbeY''s inclusion in the postulated minimal bacterial genome. However, YbeY is not essential in E. coli although loss of ybeY severely sensitizes it to multiple physiological stresses. Here, we show that YbeY is an essential endoribonuclease in Vibrio cholerae and is crucial for virulence, stress regulation, RNA processing and ribosome quality control, and is part of a core set of RNases essential in most representative pathogens. To understand its function, we analyzed the rRNA and ribosome profiles of a V. cholerae strain partially depleted for YbeY and other RNase mutants associated with 16 S rRNA processing; our results demonstrate that YbeY is also crucial for 16 S rRNA 3′ end maturation in V. cholerae and that its depletion impedes subunit assembly into 70 S ribosomes. YbeY''s importance to V. cholerae pathogenesis was demonstrated by the complete loss of mice colonization and biofilm formation, reduced cholera toxin production, and altered expression levels of virulence-associated small RNAs of a V. cholerae strain partially depleted for YbeY. Notably, the ybeY genes of several distantly related pathogens can fully complement an E. coli ΔybeY strain under various stress conditions, demonstrating the high conservation of YbeY''s activity in stress regulation. Taken together, this work provides the first comprehensive exploration of YbeY''s physiological role in a human pathogen, showing its conserved function across species in essential cellular processes.     

The World Health Organisation. WHO in Europe: does it have a role?

WHO is under pressure from all sides to justify its existence. Donors want to know what they are getting for their money, and health professionals question the relevance of the organisation''s work. The pressure to justify itself is perhaps strongest of all in Europe, where most member countries have fully fledged health infrastructures and high overall levels of health. Now there is the additional threat of encroachment into the field of public health by the European Union. The disintegration of the Soviet bloc has given WHO''s regional office in Europe a new sense of purpose and led to a major shift in resources towards the countries of central and eastern Europe. But WHO''s critics are calling for a different shift in the way its European office works: from its current concentration on broad based policy issues to the nitty-gritty of health care management and delivery.     

THE NEUROLOGICAL PROGRAM OF THE VETERANS ADMINISTRATION

The reorganization of the medical department of the Veterans Administration has given considerable impetus to neurology, a part of the division of psychiatry and neurology. The neurologic service of the V. A. is the largest in the world today, and is constantly increasing. This service is made available to veterans through hospitals and regional offices within the designated area, which are branch administrative offices under the central office.A residency training program for specialization is under the direction of a deans'' committee in every large medical center. This committee, which is formed from the faculties of medical schools, also approves the visiting medical staffs of hospitals. The neurologic program consists of a number of special activities, which include residency training for certification, neurologic diagnosis, rehabilitation of patients with chronic illness, electroencephalography, epilepsy, aphasia and research. The paraplegia program is now a separate service, but is also participated in by the neurologist. Both the neurologist and the psychiatrist are interested in the patient with organic psychosis, and the neurologist also works in close relationship with the neurosurgeon.There is need for neurologists in the V. A., which offers attractive opportunities in clinical practice and in research, as well as inducements of advancement and adequate financial returns.     

Emotional Valence and the Free-Energy Principle

The free-energy principle has recently been proposed as a unified Bayesian account of perception, learning and action. Despite the inextricable link between emotion and cognition, emotion has not yet been formulated under this framework. A core concept that permeates many perspectives on emotion is valence, which broadly refers to the positive and negative character of emotion or some of its aspects. In the present paper, we propose a definition of emotional valence in terms of the negative rate of change of free-energy over time. If the second time-derivative of free-energy is taken into account, the dynamics of basic forms of emotion such as happiness, unhappiness, hope, fear, disappointment and relief can be explained. In this formulation, an important function of emotional valence turns out to regulate the learning rate of the causes of sensory inputs. When sensations increasingly violate the agent''s expectations, valence is negative and increases the learning rate. Conversely, when sensations increasingly fulfil the agent''s expectations, valence is positive and decreases the learning rate. This dynamic interaction between emotional valence and learning rate highlights the crucial role played by emotions in biological agents'' adaptation to unexpected changes in their world.     

The Phosphodiesterase 9 Inhibitor PF‐04449613 Promotes Dendritic Spine Formation and Performance Improvement after Motor Learning

The cyclic nucleotide cGMP is an intracellular second messenger with important roles in neuronal functions and animals' behaviors. The phosphodiesterases (PDEs) are a family of enzymes that hydrolyze the second messengers cGMP and cAMP. Inhibition of phosphodiesterase 9 (PDE9), a main isoform of PDEs hydrolyzing cGMP, has been shown to improve learning and memory as well as cognitive function in rodents. However, the role of PDE9 in regulating neuronal structure and function in vivo remains unclear. Here we used in vivo two‐photon microscopy to investigate the effect of a selective PDE9 inhibitor PF‐04449613 on the activity and plasticity of dendritic spines of layer V pyramidal neurons in the mouse primary motor cortex. We found that administration of PF‐04449613 increased calcium activity of dendrites and dendritic spines of layer V pyramidal neurons in mice under resting and running conditions. Chronic treatment of PF‐04449613 over weeks increased dendritic spine formation and elimination under basal conditions. Furthermore, PF‐04449613 treatment over 1–7 days increased the formation and survival of new spines as well as performance improvement after rotarod motor training. Taken together, our studies suggest that elevating the level of cGMP with the PDE9 inhibitor PF‐04449613 increases synaptic calcium activity and learning‐dependent synaptic plasticity, thereby contributing to performance improvement after learning. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol 00: 000–000, 2018     

Human Collective Intelligence under Dual Exploration-Exploitation Dilemmas

The exploration-exploitation dilemma is a recurrent adaptive problem for humans as well as non-human animals. Given a fixed time/energy budget, every individual faces a fundamental trade-off between exploring for better resources and exploiting known resources to optimize overall performance under uncertainty. Colonies of eusocial insects are known to solve this dilemma successfully via evolved coordination mechanisms that function at the collective level. For humans and other non-eusocial species, however, this dilemma operates within individuals as well as between individuals, because group members may be motivated to take excessive advantage of others'' exploratory findings through social learning. Thus, even though social learning can reduce collective exploration costs, the emergence of disproportionate “information scroungers” may severely undermine its potential benefits. We investigated experimentally whether social learning opportunities might improve the performance of human participants working on a “multi-armed bandit” problem in groups, where they could learn about each other''s past choice behaviors. Results showed that, even though information scroungers emerged frequently in groups, social learning opportunities reduced total group exploration time while increasing harvesting from better options, and consequentially improved collective performance. Surprisingly, enriching social information by allowing participants to observe others'' evaluations of chosen options (e.g., Amazon''s 5-star rating system) in addition to choice-frequency information had a detrimental impact on performance compared to the simpler situation with only the choice-frequency information. These results indicate that humans groups can handle the fundamental “dual exploration-exploitation dilemmas” successfully, and that social learning about simple choice-frequencies can help produce collective intelligence.     

Widening the lens: what the manual modality reveals about language,learning and cognition

The goal of this paper is to widen the lens on language to include the manual modality. We look first at hearing children who are acquiring language from a spoken language model and find that even before they use speech to communicate, they use gesture. Moreover, those gestures precede, and predict, the acquisition of structures in speech. We look next at deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from using the oral modality, and whose hearing parents have not presented them with a language model in the manual modality. These children fall back on the manual modality to communicate and use gestures, which take on many of the forms and functions of natural language. These homemade gesture systems constitute the first step in the emergence of manual sign systems that are shared within deaf communities and are full-fledged languages. We end by widening the lens on sign language to include gesture and find that signers not only gesture, but they also use gesture in learning contexts just as speakers do. These findings suggest that what is key in gesture''s ability to predict learning is its ability to add a second representational format to communication, rather than a second modality. Gesture can thus be language, assuming linguistic forms and functions, when other vehicles are not available; but when speech or sign is possible, gesture works along with language, providing an additional representational format that can promote learning.     

Commentary: The Life And Times Of V. M. Bekhterev

The provocative article that follows has been translated as part of our endeavors to uncover the contributions of V. M. Bekhterev to social psychology. For these introductory comments we rely most heavily on two sources available in English, mainly the work of Alex Kozulin (1984) and V. Gerver (1932), a junior colleague of Bekhterev's. Other valuable material was provided by the work of A. L. Schniermann (1930), another of Bekhterev's junior associates. These and other writings yield a picture of an outstanding Russian scientist who published about six hundred works on anatomy and physiology, nervous and mental diseases, biology and pedology, philosophy and reflexology; who established an astonishing number of research units and laboratories, ranging from the enormous Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg to small laboratories for research on vocational counseling, children's neuropathology, etc.; and who founded several important journals. In time, he should probably become generally acknowledged as one of the founders of social psychology as well.     

Higher frequency of social learning in China than in the West shows cultural variation in the dynamics of cultural evolution

Cultural evolutionary models have identified a range of conditions under which social learning (copying others) is predicted to be adaptive relative to asocial learning (learning on one''s own), particularly in humans where socially learned information can accumulate over successive generations. However, cultural evolution and behavioural economics experiments have consistently shown apparently maladaptive under-utilization of social information in Western populations. Here we provide experimental evidence of cultural variation in people''s use of social learning, potentially explaining this mismatch. People in mainland China showed significantly more social learning than British people in an artefact-design task designed to assess the adaptiveness of social information use. People in Hong Kong, and Chinese immigrants in the UK, resembled British people in their social information use, suggesting a recent shift in these groups from social to asocial learning due to exposure to Western culture. Finally, Chinese mainland participants responded less than other participants to increased environmental change within the task. Our results suggest that learning strategies in humans are culturally variable and not genetically fixed, necessitating the study of the ‘social learning of social learning strategies'' whereby the dynamics of cultural evolution are responsive to social processes, such as migration, education and globalization.     

Should dispersers be fast learners? Modeling the role of cognition in dispersal syndromes

Both cognitive abilities and dispersal tendencies can vary strongly between individuals. Since cognitive abilities may help dealing with unknown circumstances, it is conceivable that dispersers may rely more heavily on learning abilities than residents. However, cognitive abilities are costly and leaving a familiar place might result in losing the advantage of having learned to deal with local conditions. Thus, individuals which invested in learning to cope with local conditions may be better off staying at their natal place. In order to disentangle the complex relationship between dispersal and learning abilities, we implemented individual‐based simulations. By allowing for developmental plasticity, individuals could either become a ''resident'' or ''dispersal'' cognitive phenotype. The model showed that in general residents have higher learning abilities than dispersers. Dispersers evolve higher learning ability than residents when dispersers have long life spans and when dispersal occurs either early or late in life, thereby maximizing the time in one habitat patch. Time is crucial here, because the longer an individual resides in a location where it can use its learned knowledge or behavior, the more often it profits from it and thus eventually obtains a net benefit from its investment into learning. Both, longevity and the timing of dispersal within lifecycles determine the time individuals have to recoup that investment and thus crucially influence this correlation. We therefore suggest that species'' life history will strongly impact the expected cognitive abilities of dispersers, relative to their resident conspecifics, and that cognitive abilities might be an integral part of dispersal syndromes.     

Moses Maimonides: rabbi or medicine.

The great medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides was also a practicing physician who contributed a number of important works to medical literature. Modern students of these treatises have made extravagant claims about Maimonides'' scientific outlook and have attributed to him important discoveries and innovations. Viewed in its historical and religious content, Maimonides'' medical work appears more explanatory than exploratory, though still of considerable interest to students of both the philosophy of science and the history of medicine.     

The effect of learning on the function of monkey extrastriate visual cortex

One of the most remarkable capabilities of the adult brain is its ability to learn and continuously adapt to an ever-changing environment. While many studies have documented how learning improves the perception and identification of visual stimuli, relatively little is known about how it modifies the underlying neural mechanisms. We trained monkeys to identify natural images that were degraded by interpolation with visual noise. We found that learning led to an improvement in monkeys' ability to identify these indeterminate visual stimuli. We link this behavioral improvement to a learning-dependent increase in the amount of information communicated by V4 neurons. This increase was mediated by a specific enhancement in neural activity. Our results reveal a mechanism by which learning increases the amount of information that V4 neurons are able to extract from the visual environment. This suggests that V4 plays a key role in resolving indeterminate visual inputs by coordinated interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing streams.     

PBL+LBL教学模式在留学生医学微生物学教学中的实践

由于留学生的特殊性导致他们对传统教学模式的不适应,医学微生物学的课程特点使留学生学习掌握相关知识较困难,有必要探索好的教学方法,提高教学质量。我国传统的LBL教学模式和国际上流行的PBL教学模式各有优缺点,我们融合PBL和LBL的优点,互补其缺点,对留学生医学微生物学课程采取PBL+LBL教学模式,既发挥PBL教学法打破学科界限,容易调动学生学习积极性,注重培养学生自主学习和团结协作能力的特点,又结合LBL教学法传授知识系统、完整,培养学生基础理论扎实等优势。教学实践证明,PBL+LBL教学法运用于留学生医学微生物学教学,能激发留学生学习兴趣,在增强留学生对医学微生物学基础理论和基本技能掌握的同时,培养留学生知识整合的能力及创新思维的医学综合能力,提高教学质量。     

Care management and mental health.

The community care reforms will produce a new kind of key worker who will organise and budget for packages of care: the care manager. Care management goes live in April 1993 but is still poorly rehearsed and its performance may yet disappoint. This overview sets out the origins of case management, its transformation into care management, and the principles guiding its practice. To spell out how the concept works, plans for care management in Southwark''s mental health services are described.     

Dynamics Modeling and Simulation of a Bionic Swim Bladder System in Underwater Robotics

While considering that fish could suspend themselves under water and could enhance their mobility by adjusting its swim bladder, we have carried out research on a bionic swim bladder system in underwater robotics, which could amend the underwater robotics' static balance and controllability conditions even if the depth of water changes. First, this paper introduces the bio-swim bladder's structure and function. Second, it works out the dynamic model of the bionic swim bladder, and then it analyses the dynamic characteristic and effect of the bionic swim bladder system with the software Matlab/simulink. Finally, considering about the nonlinear relationship of the parameters in the model, this paper brings forward a dual-speed control method, which could make the effect of the bionic swim bladder non-coupling. The result of the simulation reveals that the bionic swim bladder could change the buoyancy and centroid distribution of the underwater robotics effectively and independently, bringing it into a balance state, under which the control and maneuverability could be enhanced.     

Observations on the Factor V activator present in Russell's viper venom and its action on Factor V

The Factor V activator (RVV-V) of Russell's viper venom can cause a 20–26-fold increase in the Factor V activity of bovine and human plasma whereas only a 2–4-fold increase was obtained under similar conditions with bovine serum Factor V activity. On incubation with RVV-V, bovine plasma Factor V underwent a significant change in behavior on Sephadex chromatography, with an apparent change in molecular weight from a value greater than 400 000 to one near 205 000. Bovine serum Factor V, as isolated, had a molecular weight (size) of approximately 230 000 which did not change on treatment with RVV-V.