Are knowledge- and belief-reasoning automatic, and is this the right question?

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew D. R. Surtees ◽  
Andrew R. Todd
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Knowledge And Beliefs ◽  
The Right ◽  
Belief Reasoning

Abstract Phillips et al. conclude that current evidence supports knowledge-, but not belief-reasoning as being automatic. We suggest four reasons why this is an oversimplified answer to a question that might not have a clear-cut answer: (1) knowledge and beliefs can be incompletely equated to perceptual states, (2) sensitivity to mental states does not necessitate representation, (3) automaticity is not a single categorical feature, and (4) how we represent others' minds is dependent on social context.

Extensive Left Temporal Pole Damage Does Not Impact on Theory of Mind Abilities

2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (12) ◽  
pp. 2025-2046 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Michel ◽  
Laurence Dricot ◽  
Renaud Lhommel ◽  
Cécile Grandin ◽  
Adrian Ivanoiu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Semantic Dementia ◽  
Knowledge And Beliefs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Temporal Pole ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Brain

The temporal poles (TPs) are among the brain regions that are often considered as the brain network sustaining our ability to understand other people's mental states or “Theory of Mind” (ToM). However, so far the functional role of the left and right TPs in ToM is still debated, and it is even not clear yet whether these regions are necessary for ToM. In this study, we tested whether the left TP is necessary for ToM by assessing the mentalizing abilities of a patient (C.M.) diagnosed with semantic dementia. Converging evidence from detailed MRI and 18F-fluoro-2-deoxy-d-glucose PET examinations showed a massive atrophy of the left TP with the right TP being relatively unaffected. Furthermore, C.M.'s atrophy encompassed most regions of the left TP usually activated in neuroimaging studies investigating ToM. Given C.M.'s language impairments, we used a battery of entirely nonverbal ToM tasks. Across five tasks encompassing 100 trials, which probed the patient's ability to attribute various mental states (intentions, knowledge, and beliefs), C.M. showed a totally spared performance. This finding suggests that, despite its consistently observed activation in neuroimaging studies involving ToM tasks, the left TP is not necessary for ToM reasoning, at least in nonverbal conditions and as long as its right counterpart is preserved. Implications for understanding the social abilities of patients with semantic dementia are discussed.

Evaluation of staff in Healthcare Companies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Troncone Raffaella ◽  
Coda Marco
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Evaluation System ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Rehabilitation Services ◽  
Individual Contribution ◽  
Personnel Evaluation ◽  
Good Evaluation ◽  
The Right

Evaluation is at the basis of any social context where all individuals are simultaneously "evaluated" and "evaluators" in all areas of daily life. The goal of a good evaluation system is to encourage staff to do "Good Health" through the provision of quality prevention, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation services. The main reasons that lead to the evaluation of the personnel lie in the inevitable and primary importance of the human resource in achieving the corporate objectives, and by the pressing need for the quality of the service provided to the citizen, as well as the legitimate need of the employee to differentiate, clarifying its specificities and its own individual contribution to the general objectives of the company. In the working context, the "personnel evaluation" assumes a fundamental importance, if managed with the right criteria, in order to make the employee not a simple pawn to move and manage for use and consumption of the organization, but an integral part of the organization itself.

Patent Foramen Ovale, the Role of Antiplatelet Therapy Alone or Anticoagulant Therapy Alone Versus Device Closure for Cryptogenic Stroke: A Review of the Literature and Current Recommendations

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-150
Author(s):  
Harsha S. Nagarajarao ◽  
Chandra P. Ojha ◽  
Archana Kedar ◽  
Debabrata Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Patent Foramen Ovale ◽  
Cryptogenic Stroke ◽  
Narrow Channel ◽  
Paradoxical Embolism ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Foramen Ovale ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Current Guidelines

: Cryptogenic stroke and its relation to the Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO) is a long-debated topic. Recent clinical trials have unequivocally established the relationship between cryptogenic strokes and paradoxical embolism across the PFO. This slit-like communication exists in everyone before birth, but most often closes shortly after birth. PFO may persist as a narrow channel of communication between the right and left atria in approximately 25-27% of adults. : In this review, we examine the clinical relevance of the PFO with analysis of the latest trials evaluating catheter-based closure of PFO’s for cryptogenic stroke. We also review the current evidence examining the use of antiplatelet medications versus anticoagulants for stroke prevention in those patients with PFO who do not qualify for closure per current guidelines.

P–505 The right age to tell? The insufficiency of the age criteria for characterizing the experience of French donor conceived families in disclosing to their offspring

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (Supplement_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
A Martin ◽  
S Carez ◽  
C Metzler-Guillemain ◽  
A Martial
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Family Context ◽  
Heterosexual Couples ◽  
Older Parents ◽  
Donor Conception ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Right

Abstract Study question Is age a key criteria for characterizing the experience of families in telling donor offspring about the facts of their conception? Summary answer The study shows that, although donor offspring’s age at the time of disclosure has an impact, it is insufficient to describe these families’ experiences What is known already Secrecy was the norm for decades in donor conception, but “openness” has now become the new core value for institutions, professionals and interest groups. Accordingly, in recent years information-sharing practices have shifted in donor conceived families, but a proportion of parents, especially heterosexual couples, still appear to not inform their children about their being donor conceived. Disclosure recommendations seem difficult to apply in practice. A recurring question is: when should children be told? Age is presented as a key criteria: the younger the children are when their conception story is shared, the less of a problem it would create. Study design, size, duration The qualitative social science study includes two sets of semi-directive interviews conducted with 20 French sperm donor conceived adults (April-Dec. 2019) and 22 French parents by sperm, egg or double donation (Feb.-Oct. 2020). Calls for interviews aimed at donor conceived adults and parents by donation were shared on the Internet, in the media (press, radio, television) and through interest groups (PMAnonyme, BAMP!, MAIA) in France. The contact initiative was left to potential participants. Participants/materials, setting, methods Donor conceived participants include 17 women and 3 men conceived 1960–2000 through anonymous sperm donation in heteroparental families. The parent participants include 20 families (20 mothers, 2 fathers) who used donor conception—mainly anonymous (19)—in France, Spain and the Czech Republic starting in the 1980s. 17 conceived as heteroparental couples, 2 as solo-mothers-by-choice and 1 as a same-sex couple. 17 have already informed their offspring of the facts of their conception. Main results and the role of chance The participants’ experiences of disclosure appear to be bound to their historical and social context, especially regarding the prevailing norms on secrecy. Older parents mention having been advised by clinic professionals to keep the facts of their conception from their child(ren). Some also feared the stigma related to infertility. In contrast, some younger donor conceived participants recall the use of a children’s book while being told of their conception as toddlers. Beyond age, the larger context thus affects information-sharing practices. Furthermore, experiences of disclosure are impacted by the family context and history. Some are embedded within larger events such as divorces or the death of a family member. The story of the donation may be linked to narratives of diseases (such as cancer) or traumatic events (such as the loss of a fetus in utero) that may prevail over donor conception or make it untellable. Age proves to be an insufficient criteria to qualify these experiences, all the more so since “disclosure” sometimes unfolds in several steps. Some parents have first talked about their fertility issues without mentioning the use of a donor. Behind the prevailing norm of “openness”, difficulties in actually disclosing are confirmed. Limitations, reasons for caution Being qualitative, the study only includes a small number of participants without claiming exhaustivity nor representativity. It imperfectly reports on the view of those who do not disclose, as all participants question the principle of secrecy, many being members of interest groups defending openness. Wider implications of the findings: Our results complement existing studies that emphasize the weight of age in donor conceived families’ experience regarding disclosure. Age alone cannot describe information-sharing practices that are embedded within their historical and social context as well as the family context and history. Results thus inform familial difficulties related to disclosure. Trial registration number Not applicable

scholarly journals The Interaction Between Caudate Nucleus and Regions Within the Theory of Mind Network as a Neural Basis for Social Intelligence

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikhail Votinov ◽  
Artem Myznikov ◽  
Maya Zheltyakova ◽  
Ruslan Masharipov ◽  
Alexander Korotkov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Caudate Nucleus ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Functional Integration ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Caudate Nuclei ◽  
Structural Peculiarity ◽  
The Right

The organization of socio-cognitive processes is a multifaceted problem for which many sophisticated concepts have been proposed. One of these concepts is social intelligence (SI), i.e., the set of abilities that allow successful interaction with other people. The theory of mind (ToM) human brain network is a good candidate for the neural substrate underlying SI since it is involved in inferring the mental states of others and ourselves and predicting or explaining others’ actions. However, the relationship of ToM to SI remains poorly explored. Our recent research revealed an association between the gray matter volume of the caudate nucleus and the degree of SI as measured by the Guilford-Sullivan test. It led us to question whether this structural peculiarity is reflected in changes to the integration of the caudate with other areas of the brain associated with socio-cognitive processes, including the ToM system. We conducted seed-based functional connectivity (FC) analysis of resting-state fMRI data for 42 subjects with the caudate as a region of interest. We found that the scores of the Guilford-Sullivan test were positively correlated with the FC between seeds in the right caudate head and two clusters located within the right superior temporal gyrus and bilateral precuneus. Both regions are known to be nodes of the ToM network. Thus, the current study demonstrates that the SI level is associated with the degree of functional integration between the ToM network and the caudate nuclei.

scholarly journals Finding the Right Balance: Financial Self-Help Organizations as Sources of Security and Insecurity in Urban Indonesia

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (S8) ◽  
pp. 159-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hotze Lont
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Right ◽  
Financial Arrangements ◽  
Main Shortcoming ◽  
The Way

Financial self-help organizations can be found in many parts of the world, and the cities of Java are among the areas where they are particularly widespread. Since about the 1950s, interest in these institutions among anthropologists and development sociologists has increased considerably. Analyses of financial self-help organizations have most often focused on their economic or their social function; few scholars have pointed to their function as providers of security and identified self-help organizations as typical forms of local social security institutions. The main shortcoming of most of these studies is that they base their conclusions solely on an analysis of the financial arrangements provided by these self-help organizations, neglecting the accommodating practices that people undertake in order to fit the provisions of self-help organizations to their own household needs. This essay explores the observation that financial self-help organizations do not simply provide security through the different kinds of insurance mechanisms they might contain, but that, particularly through the way in which people use them and participate in them, these institutions become meaningful for coping with insecurity. It examines the question of whether participation in financial self-help organizations contributes to the ability of households to cope with adversities and deficiencies in a concrete social context. Research aiming to answer this question was conducted in Bujung, an urban ward on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, on the island of Java.

scholarly journals Moral judgement by the disconnected left and right cerebral hemispheres: a split-brain investigation

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 170172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conor M. Steckler ◽  
J. Kiley Hamlin ◽  
Michael B. Miller ◽  
Danielle King ◽  
Alan Kingstone
Keyword(s):  
Brain Research ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Moral Judgement ◽  
Temporoparietal Junction ◽  
Split Brain ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
The Right ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

Owing to the hemispheric isolation resulting from a severed corpus callosum, research on split-brain patients can help elucidate the brain regions necessary and sufficient for moral judgement. Notably, typically developing adults heavily weight the intentions underlying others' moral actions, placing greater importance on valenced intentions versus outcomes when assigning praise and blame. Prioritization of intent in moral judgements may depend on neural activity in the right hemisphere's temporoparietal junction, an area implicated in reasoning about mental states. To date, split-brain research has found that the right hemisphere is necessary for intent-based moral judgement. When testing the left hemisphere using linguistically based moral vignettes, split-brain patients evaluate actions based on outcomes, not intentions. Because the right hemisphere has limited language ability relative to the left, and morality paradigms to date have involved significant linguistic demands, it is currently unknown whether the right hemisphere alone generates intent-based judgements. Here we use nonlinguistic morality plays with split-brain patient J.W. to examine the moral judgements of the disconnected right hemisphere, demonstrating a clear focus on intent. This finding indicates that the right hemisphere is not only necessary but also sufficient for intent-based moral judgement, advancing research into the neural systems supporting the moral sense.

Belief

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Internal State ◽  
Propositional Attitude ◽  
Special Theory ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Public Language ◽  
Vice Chancellor ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

We believe that there is coffee over there; we believe the special theory of relativity; we believe the Vice-Chancellor; and some of us believe in God. But plausibly what is fundamental is believing that something is the case – believing a proposition, as it is usually put. To believe a theory is to believe the propositions that make up the theory, to believe a person is to believe some proposition advanced by them; and to believe in God is to believe the proposition that God exists. Thus belief is said to be a propositional attitude or intentional state: to believe is to take the attitude of belief to some proposition. It is about what its propositional object is about (God, coffee, or whatever). We can think of the propositional object of a belief as the way the belief represents things as being – its content, as it is often called. We state what we believe with indicative sentences in ‘that’-clauses, as in ‘Mary believes that the Democrats will win the next election’. But belief in the absence of language is possible. A dog may believe that there is food in the bowl in front of it. Accordingly philosophers have sought accounts of belief that allow a central role to sentences – it cannot be an accident that finding the right sentence is the way to capture what someone believes – while allowing that creatures without a language can have beliefs. One way of doing this is to construe beliefs as relations to inner sentences somehow inscribed in the brain. On this view although dogs do not have a public language, to the extent that they have beliefs they have something sentence-like in their heads. An alternative tradition focuses on the way belief when combined with desire leads to behaviour, and analyses belief in terms of behavioural dispositions or more recently as the internal state that is, in combination with other mental states, responsible for the appropriate behavioural dispositions. An earlier tradition associated with the British Empiricists views belief as a kind of pale imitation of perceptual experience. But recent work on belief largely takes for granted a sharp distinction between belief and the various mental images that may or may not accompany it.

Rahmat

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-194
Author(s):  
Andrea Chiovenda
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Drug Trafficking ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Rural Village ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So

The chapter revolves around Rahmat, a young man, father of two, who lives in a rural village on the border with Pakistan. His case is different from the previous ones in that he embodies apparently all the characteristics that would be expected from an appropriate Pashtun masculinity. He is in fact a well-known and respected figure in his district. Under the surface, however, lies the conflicted personal history of a man who straddled the geographical border of the two countries to engage in drug trafficking and production, and who secretly longs to escape elsewhere to regain the sense of an ideal masculinity, of which he feels he was metaphorically robbed by the distortions of a war-ravaged social context. The sense of responsibility to embody the features of the “perfect” Pashtun man clashes with the inability to do so in the “right” way, due to the perceived degeneration of modern life in Afghanistan.

scholarly journals An unusual case of deep venous thrombosis in a young patient: congenital absence of the infrarenal portion of the inferior vena cava

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Osborne ◽  
Frances Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Inferior Vena Cava ◽  
Venous Thrombosis ◽  
Deep Venous Thrombosis ◽  
Inferior Vena ◽  
Vena Cava ◽  
Congenital Absence ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Established Risk Factor ◽  
The Right

Abstract Deep venous thrombosis (DVT) is a commonly encountered diagnosis in clinical practice with a variety of well-established risk factors. Congenital absence of the inferior vena cava (IVC) is an extremely rare but established risk factor for DVT. Patients who develop DVTs are at high risk of long-term complications, including DVT recurrence and post-thrombotic syndrome. Here we report a rare case of a 27-year-old female who presented with an extensive DVT of the right lower extremity secondary to complete absence of the infrarenal portion of the IVC, confirmed on computed tomography. There is little consensus regarding the appropriate management of this patient population, and a brief review of the current evidence follows.

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