The Anterior Attentional–Intentional System in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease—A Pilot and Feasibility Study

(1) Background: This study compared anterior attentional–intentional system performance between three groups: Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with normal cognition (PD-NC), with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI), and a comparison group (CG). It also evaluated the feasibility of the recruitment and study procedures; (2) Methods: From 45 participants recruited, 39 were allocated (mean age 65.31; 43.59% men) to PD-NC, PD-MCI and CG (13 per group). To assess attention, we used three tasks from the ROtman–Baycrest Battery for Investigating Attention: Simple Reaction time (RT), Choice RT, and Prepare RT. We conducted a mixed-model analysis of variance with a 3 (groups) × 4 (tasks) design to compare reaction times; (3) Results: PD-MCI had slower reaction times than PD-NC (p = 0.028) and the CG (p = 0.052); there was no difference between PD-NC and CG. PD-MCI might perform worse on monitoring tasks than PD-NC, Z = −1.68, p = 0.092. Nearly half the volunteers from the CG and 87% of all eligible patients were enrolled in the study and completed all neuropsychological procedures; (4) Conclusions: General cognitive decline appears related to partial deficits in energization and tends to impair attentional monitoring. Furthermore, PD-NC exhibited similar reaction times to the CG. Results from the feasibility study contributed to the definitive study.

Redefining pragmatic competence among modular interactions and beyond

Language is a perfect system that satisfies the conditions imposed by the external performance/interpretive systems, but how the external systems interact with the core syntax is partially understood. With reference to Chomsky’s dichotomy of grammatical and pragmatic competences, this paper tentatively reformulates an integrated model of pragmatic competence, consisting of an internal and an external part. The former originates from the interaction of the internal syntactic submodule with external but organism-internal submodules, such as semantic, pragmatic and phonological-phonetic modules, and among three external submodules, thus creating thinking activities. The latter refers to the interaction between all organism-internal submodules and organism-external sociocultural factors, namely, mapping the computational results of the organism-internal submodules into the specific sociocultural contexts in communication. Meanwhile, this paper assumes an organism-internal pragmatic module in the Conceptual-Intentional system, providing linguistic and socio-cultural pragmatic knowledge in the operation of the internal and the external pragmatic competences, facilitating both pure thought and sociocultural communications.

Becoming a teacher leader: building social capital through gradual release

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of a mentored model of gradual release to build social capital and support teachers as they adopt new identities as leaders of professional learning. Design/methodology/approach Data for the paper were collected as part of a case study which explored the Provincial Facilitator Community (PFC) in Saskatchewan, Canada as one approach to creating a collaborative culture of teacher-led learning and leadership. Findings The findings suggest that becoming a leader of professional learning is a complex process of gaining confidence, building capacity and transitioning into a new professional identity. In the PFC, this process was markedly supported through a structured and intentional system of modeling and peer-mentorship that promoted the development of social capital across the group. Originality/value The paper provides new insights around the use of a mentored model of gradual release to create opportunities to develop social capital that, in turn, helped prepare and sustain teachers in adopting new roles as leaders of professional learning.

A complexity theory of design intentionality

The subject of this paper is design intentionality. The paper is concerned with the property of the mind to hold intentional states (its capacity to represent or reflect existing and nonexisting realities) and with the way that these mental states are constructed during design tasks. The aim is to develop a mathematical theory of design intentionality, capturing the structures and processes that characterize an intentional system with the mental ability to address design tasks. The philosophical notion of intentionality is approached methodologically from a complexity theoretic perspective. More specifically, the focus is placed on the mathematical characterization of the organizational complexity of intentional states and the type of phase transitions that occur on the mental states of an intentional system during design tasks. The paper uses category theory in order to build a framework that is able to mathematically capture the meaning of these notions.

Rationality, Religion and Intentional Systems Theory: From Objective Ethnography to the Critical Study of Religious Beliefs

Rationality pervades the study of religion. This essay argues that rationality has three roles in this context. First, it functions as a presupposition in the ethnographic descriptions of religious behaviour; second, it functions as the explanatory principle in ethnography of religion; third, rationality functions as a normative tool in the critical assessments of religion. It is argued that all three roles are rooted in the Dennettian intentional system theory and are thus intricately linked with each other. It is further argued that any ethnographic study of religion that uses the best available scientific methods in the description and explanation of human behaviour, commits itself to the relative optimality of scientific outlook and to the critique of religion in principle.

Pseudocleft Connectedness: Implications for the LF Interface Level

Pseudoclefts constitute a difficult challenge for linguistic theory, displaying effects of core syntactic conditions in a noncanonical configuration that cannot be normalized with standard syntactic operations. We argue that these “connectedness” effects follow from the nature of pseudoclefts as equatives. This treatment yields an integrated account of the syntactic and semanticopragmatic properties of the construction, but leads to the conclusion that certain syntactic constraints apply to a level of representation more abstract than LF under most current conceptions. This representation is built up in the process of discourse interpretation and may constitute the interface with the conceptual-intentional system of mind.