Philosophical controversy about the mind has flourished in the thin air of our ignorance about the brain. The humble toad, it now seems, may provide our first instance of a creature whose whole brain is within the reach of our scientific understanding. What will happen to the traditional philosophical issues as our theoretical and factual ignorance recedes? Discussion of the issues explored in the target article is, as Ewert says, "often too theoretical, sometimes philosophical and even [as if that weren't (...) bad enough?--DCD] emotion-laden." The research reported by Ewert has interesting philosophical implications, as he probably recognizes, but he wisely leaves the philosophy to the philosophers. Being one, I would like to draw some of the conclusions he eschews. (shrink)

Most infant cognitive studies use visual fixation time as the measure of interest. There are, however, some serious methodological and theoretical concerns regarding what these studies reveal about infant cognition and how their results ought to be interpreted. We propose a Bayesian modeling framework which helps address these concerns. This framework allows us to more precisely formulate hypotheses about infants’ cognitive representations, formalize “linking hypotheses” that relate infants’ visual fixation behavior with stimulus complexity, and better determine what questions a given (...) experiment can and cannot answer. (shrink)

Habituation, a form of non‐associative learning, isno longer studied exclusively within the fields of psychology and neuroscience. Indeed, the same stimulus–response pattern is observed at the molecular, cellular, and organismal scales and is not dependent upon the presence of neurons. Hence, a more inclusive theory is required to accommodate aneural forms of habituation. Here an abstraction of the habituation process that does not rely upon particular biological pathways or substrates is presented. Instead, five generalizable elements that define the habituation process (...) are operationalized. The formulation can be applied to interrogate systems as they respond to several stimulation paradigms, providing new insights and supporting existing behavioral data. The model can be used to deduce the relative contribution of elements that contribute to the measurable output of the system. The results suggest that habituation serves as a general biological strategy that any system can implement to adaptively respond to harmless, repetitive stimuli. (shrink)

Does motor behavior early in development have the same signatures of habituation, dishabituation, and Spencer-Thompson dishabituation known from infant perception and cognition? And do these signatures explain the choice preferences in A not B motor decision tasks? We provide new empirical evidence that gives an affirmative answer to the first question together with a unified neural dynamic model that gives an affirmative answer to the second question.In the perceptual and cognitive domains, habituation is the weakening of an orientation response to (...) a stimulus over perceptual experience. Switching to a novel stimulus leads to dishabituation, the re-establishment of the orientation response. In Spencer-Thompson dishabituation, the renewed orientation response transfers to the original stimulus. The change in orientation responses over perceptual experience explains infants' behavior in preferential looking tasks: Familiarity preference early during exposure and novelty preference late during exposure. In the motor domain, perseveration in the A not B task could be interpreted as a form of familiarity preference. There are hints that this preference reverses after enough experience with the familiar movement. We provide a unified account for habituation and patterns of preferential selection in which neural dynamic fields generate perceptual or motor representations. The build-up of activation in excitatory fields leads to familiarity preference, the build-up of activation in inhibitory fields leads to novelty preference. We show that the model accounts for the new experimental evidence for motor habituation, but is also compatible with earlier accounts for perceptual habituation and motor perseveration. We discuss how excitatory and inhibitory memory traces may regulate exploration and exploitation for both orientation to objects and motor behaviors. (shrink)

Habituation is defined as a decline in responding to a repeated stimulus. After more than eighty years of research, there is an enduring consensus among researchers on the existence of 9-10 behavioral regularities or parameters of habituation. There is no similar agreement, however, on the best approach to explain these facts. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Sometimes Opponent Processes (SOP) model of stimulus processing accurately describes all of these regularities. This model was proposed by Allan Wagner as a (...) quantitative elaboration of Priming Theory, which states that the processing of a stimulus, and therefore its capacity to provoke its response, depends inversely on the degree to which the stimulus is pre-represented in short-term memory. Using computer simulations, we show that all the facts involving within-session effects or short-term habituation might be the result of priming from recent presentations of the stimulus (self-generated priming). The characteristics involving between-sessions effects or long-term habituation would result from the retrieval of the representation of the stimulus from memory by the associated context (associatively-generated priming). (shrink)

Neuroconstructivism: How the Brain Constructs Cognition proposes a unifying framework for the study of cognitive development that brings together (1) constructivism (which views development as the progressive elaboration of increasingly complex structures), (2) cognitive neuroscience (which aims to understand the neural mechanisms underlying behavior), and (3) computational modeling (which proposes formal and explicit specifications of information processing). The guiding principle of our approach is context dependence, within and (in contrast to Marr [1982]) between levels of organization. We propose that three (...) mechanisms guide the emergence of representations: competition, cooperation, and chronotopy; which themselves allow for two central processes: proactivity and progressive specialization. We suggest that the main outcome of development is partial representations, distributed across distinct functional circuits. This framework is derived by examining development at the level of single neurons, brain systems, and whole organisms. We use the terms encellment, embrainment, and embodiment to describe the higher-level contextual influences that act at each of these levels of organization. To illustrate these mechanisms in operation we provide case studies in early visual perception, infant habituation, phonological development, and object representations in infancy. Three further case studies are concerned with interactions between levels of explanation: social development, atypical development and within that, developmental dyslexia. We conclude that cognitive development arises from a dynamic, contextual change in embodied neural structures leading to partial representations across multiple brain regions and timescales, in response to proactively specified physical and social environment. (shrink)

Improving public understanding and acceptance are critical for promoting coronavirus vaccination. However, how to promote COVID-19 vaccine programs remains controversial due to various ethical issues. This study, thus, aimed to survey the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines among Japanese citizens and discuss relevant ethical issues. A cross-sectional survey was conducted via an online platform. An anonymous, quantitative, self-administered online questionnaire was sent to 6965 registered Japanese residents, which included questions regarding the respondent’s general knowledge, experience, and opinions of vaccines, vaccine development, (...) COVID-19, and COVID-19 vaccines. Of the 1569 respondents, 730 and 839 were categorized into the younger and older groups, respectively. Most of the respondents possessed general knowledge of COVID-19 vaccines and their features. Of the respondents, 57.8% definitely agreed or somewhat agreed to receive COVID-19 vaccines. The older group showed significantly greater willingness to receive vaccines and higher literacy regarding vaccines in general. Possible reasons for the older group’s greater willingness to receive COVID-19 vaccines are a high risk of severe COVID-19 infection and their past accumulated experience of receiving various vaccinations. Although active public intervention could increase vaccination rates, most of the respondents did not agree with mandatory vaccination. Furthermore, a gap between the participants in the COVID-19 vaccine trials and the prioritized population in real-world vaccination should be adjusted in future vaccine development. (shrink)

This study sought to determine if hues overlayed on a video recording of a piano performance would systematically influence perception of its emotional arousal level. The hues were artificially added to a series of four short video excerpts of different performances using video editing software. Over two experiments 106 participants were sorted into 4 conditions, with each viewing different combinations of musical excerpts and hue combinations. Participants rated the emotional arousal depicted by each excerpt. Results indicated that the overall arousal (...) ratings were consistent with the nominal arousal of the selected excerpts. However, hues added to video produced no significant effect on arousal ratings, contrary to predictions. This could be due to the domination of the combined effects of other channels of information over the emotional effects of the hypothesized influence of hue on perceived performance. To our knowledge this is the first study to investigate the impact of these hues upon perceived arousal of music performance, and has implications for musical performers and stage lighting. Further research that investigates reactions during live performance and manipulation of a wider range of lighting hues, saturation and brightness levels, and editing techniques, is recommended to further scrutinize the veracity of the findings. (shrink)

Recent work indicates that there are distinct response habituation mechanisms that can be recruited by different stimulation rates and that can underlie different components (e.g., the duration or speed) of a single behavioral response. These findings raise the question: why is “the simplest form of learning” so complicated mechanistically? Beyond evolutionary selection for robustness of plasticity in learning to ignore, it is proposed in this article that multiple mechanisms of habituation have evolved to streamline shifts in ongoing behavioral strategy. Then, (...) speculations are offered regarding the implications of this reconceptualization of habituation for approaching the analysis of mechanisms of more complex forms of learning and memory. (shrink)

What mechanism implements the mutual exclusivity bias to map novel labels to objects without names? Prominent theoretical accounts of mutual exclusivity (e.g., Markman, 1989, 1990) propose that infants are guided by their knowledge of object names. However, the mutual exclusivity constraint could be implemented via monitoring of object novelty (see Merriman, Marazita, & Jarvis, 1995). We sought to discriminate between these contrasting explanations across two preferential looking experiments with 22-month-olds. In Experiment 1, infants viewed three objects: one name-known, two name-unknown. (...) Of the two name-unknown objects, one was novel, and the other had been previously familiarized. The infants responded to hearing a novel label by increasing attention only to the novel, name-unknown object. In a second experiment in which the name-known object was absent, a novel label increased infants’ attention to a novel object beyond baseline preference for novelty. The experiments provide clear evidence for a novelty-based mechanism. However, differences in the time course of disambiguation across experiments suggest that novelty processing may be influenced by contextual factors. (shrink)

Xunzi’s 荀子 advocacy for moral education is well-documented; precisely how his program bolsters moral development, and why a program touting study of ritual could be effective, remain subjects of debate. I argue that these matters can be clarified by appealing to the theory of learning and development offered by Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky posited that development depends primarily on social interactions mediated by sociocultural tools that modify learners’ cognitive architecture, enabling increasingly sophisticated thought. Vygotsky’s theory is remarkably similar to Xunzi’s account (...) of how studying and practicing ritual restructures learners’ moral psychology. Specifically, both Vygotsky and Xunzi offer nonnativist accounts of psychosocial development that emphasize the centrality of sociocultural tools for learning. This comparison yields a more nuanced and empirically supported interpretation of Xunzi’s account of moral education, as well as an account that has applications in contemporary work in moral education and development. (shrink)

People who habituate to stress show a repetition-induced response attenuation—neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, neuroenergetic, and emotional—when exposed to a threatening environment. But the exact dynamics underlying stress habituation remain obscure. The free energy principle offers a unifying account of self-organising systems such as the human brain. In this paper, we elaborate on how stress habituation can be explained and modelled using the free energy principle. We introduce habituation priors that encode the agent’s tendency for stress habituation and incorporate them in the agent’s (...) decision-making process. Using differently shaped goal priors—that encode the agent’s goal preferences—we illustrate, in two examples, the optimising behaviour of agents. We show that habituation minimises free energy by reducing the precision of goal preferences. Reducing the precision of goal priors means that the agent accepts adverse states. Acceptance or tolerance of adverse outcomes may explain why habituation causes people to exhibit an attenuation of the stress response. Given that stress habituation occurs in brain regions where goal priors are encoded, i.e., in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and that these priors are encoded as sufficient statistics of probability distributions, our approach seems plausible from an anatomical-functional and neuro-statistical point of view. The ensuing formal and generalisable account—based on the free energy principle—further motivate our novel treatment of stress habituation. Our analysis suggests that stress habituation has far-reaching consequences, protecting against the harmful effects of toxic stress, but on the other hand making the acceptability of precarious living conditions and the development of the obese type 2 diabetes mellitus phenotype more likely. (shrink)

Ng :255–285, 1995. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00852469) models the evolutionary dynamics underlying the existence of suffering and enjoyment and concludes that there is likely to be more suffering than enjoyment in nature. In this paper, we find an error in Ng’s model that, when fixed, negates the original conclusion. Instead, the model offers only ambiguity as to whether suffering or enjoyment predominates in nature. We illustrate the dynamics around suffering and enjoyment with the most plausible parameters. In our illustration, we find surprising results: (...) the rate of failure to reproduce can improve or worsen average welfare depending on other characteristics of a species. Our illustration suggests that for organisms with more intense conscious experiences, the balance of enjoyment and suffering may lean more toward suffering. We offer some suggestions for empirical study of wild animal welfare. We conclude by noting that recent writings on wild animal welfare should be revised based on this correction to have a somewhat less pessimistic view of nature. (shrink)

Prior research suggests that visual features of the classroom environment (e.g., charts and posters) are potential sources of distraction hindering children's ability to maintain attention to instructional activities and reducing learning gains in a laboratory classroom. However, prior research only examined short‐term exposure to elements of classroom décor, and it remains unknown whether children habituate to the visual environment with repeated exposure. In study 1, we explored experimentally the possibility that children may habituate to the visual environment if the visual (...) displays are static. We measured kindergarten children's patterns of attention allocation in a decorated classroom environment over a 2‐week period and compared the percentage of time children spent off‐task to a baseline condition in which the classroom environment was streamlined (i.e., charts, posters, and manipulatives were removed). The findings indicate that with more prolonged exposure to a static visual environment, partial habitation effects were observed: Attention to the environment declined at the end of the exposure period compared to the beginning of the study; however, the environment remained a significant source of off‐task behavior even after 2 weeks of exposure. In study 2, we extend this work by conducting a longitudinal observation of six primary classrooms in which we measured children's patterns of attention allocation in real classrooms for 15 weeks to investigate whether increasing familiarity with the classroom décor would influence attention toward the visual environment. No evidence of habituation was observed in genuine classrooms in study 2. Potential implications for classroom design and future directions are discussed. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia las variaciones del “percibir afectivo” (Fühlen) del dolor, al que denominamos “dolorsentimiento” por ofrecernos la “cara valorativa” del “dolor-sensación”. En él consideramos el percibir afectivo del dolor como un acto cognoscitivo, de modo que sus variaciones constituyen estrictos “engaños (Täuschungen) afectivos”, que, a nivel formal, podrían ir desde el sufrir por exceso hasta la indiferencia o el disfrute. Pero el artículo defiende que, en realidad, los únicos engaños que se producen de hecho son engaños por exceso, en (...) los que el dolor se sufre más de lo debido (engaños ligados al hedonismo). Y el disfrute del dolor o la indiferencia, que se dan respectivamente en el masoquismo y en las leucotomías prefrontales, se sitúan ya en el ámbito de las “respuestas afectivas” al dolor, que en el artículo se distinguen con claridad del nivel previo del percibir afectivo. A su vez, las variaciones del percibir afectivo se diferencian de las variaciones del “umbral del dolor-sensación”, estudiadas desde la psicofísica. (shrink)