Infants’ and toddlers’ evaluations of helpers depend on their understanding of action goals

Although studies have found that infants prefer helpful individuals over unhelpful ones, the basis of such evaluations is unclear. If infants and toddlers, like adults, understand helping as fostering others’ goals, then their evaluations should depend on their ability to infer the goal of an agent in need of help. Here, 15-month-old toddlers and 8-month-old infants (n = 48) differentially evaluated acts of help, consistent with their developing understanding of means-end actions. In further experiments (n = 40), when a protagonist directly grasped an object, 8-month-old infants represented that goal and preferred an agent who facilitated it. These findings connect early evaluations of helping to action understanding.

Respiratory function modulated during execution, observation, and imagination of walking via SII

The Mirror Neurons System (MNS) consists of brain areas active during actions execution, as well as observation-imagination of the same actions. MNS represents a potential mechanism by which we understand other's action goals. We investigated MNS activation for legs actions, and its interaction with the autonomic nervous system. We performed a physiological and fMRI investigation on the common neural structures recruited during the execution, observation, and imagination of walking, and their effects on respiratory activity. Bilateral SMA were activated by all three tasks, suggesting that these areas are responsible for the core of the MNS effect for walking. Moreover, we observed in bilateral parietal opercula (OP1, secondary somatosensory cortex-SII) evidence of an MNS subtending walking execution-observation-imagination that also modulated the respiratory function. We suggest that SII, in modulating the vegetative response during motor activity but also during observation-imagination, consists of a re-enacting function which facilitates the understanding of motor actions.

Online Movement Correction in Response to the Unexpectedly Perturbed Initial or Final Action Goals: An ERP and sLORETA Study

In this experiment, we explored how unexpected perturbations in the initial (grip posture) and the final action goals (target position) influence movement execution and the neural mechanisms underlying the movement corrections. Participants were instructed to grasp a handle and rotate it to a target position according to a given visual cue. After participants started their movements, a secondary cue was triggered, which indicated whether the initial or final goals had changed (or not) while the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. The results showed that the perturbed initial goals significantly slowed down the reaching action, compared to the perturbed final goals. In the event-related potentials (ERPs), a larger anterior P3 and a larger central-distributed late positivity (600–700 ms) time-locked to the perturbations were found for the initial than for the final goal perturbations. Source analyses found stronger left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) activations for the perturbed initial goals than for the perturbed final goals in the P3 time window. These findings suggest that perturbations in the initial goals have stronger interferences with the execution of grasp-to-rotate movements than perturbations in the final goals. The interferences seem to be derived from both inappropriate action inhibitions and new action implementations during the movement correction.

E-learning in maritime affairs

E-learning has become a widespread form of education as it allows the users a relatively easy access to needed information. E-learning has also been present in maritime affairs, although not so ubiquitous as in other economy sectors. Sea-borne shipping is one of the most stringently controlled industries, with a number of complex regulations and standards. This paper analyses learning methodologies and discusses the economic justification of implementing e-learning systems at global level, with an emphasis on the growing e-learning industry, corporate segment of e-learning, massive open online course market, and the importance of the micro-learning concept. In addition, this study analyses the present systems of seafarers’ education and the potentials, strengths and shortcomings of the conventional learning, e-learning and m-learning. Moreover, the recent application of e-learning in maritime affairs and the need of further research of the e-learning impacts in maritime affairs are examined. Finally, the presented information and discussion result in the logic matrix analysis and the SWOT analysis of e-learning, aiming to define the strengths, weaknesses, logic of action, goals and potentials of the implementation of e-learning in maritime affairs. Keywords: E-learning, education of seafarers, STCW Convention, IMO.

The ability to predict actions of others from distributed cues is still developing in six- to eight-year-old children

Adults use distributed cues in the bodies of others to predict and counter their actions. To investigate the development of this ability, adults and 6- to 8-year-old children played a competitive game with a confederate who reached toward one of two targets. Child and adult participants, who sat across from the confederate, attempted to beat the confederate to the target by touching it before the confederate did. Adults used cues distributed through the head, shoulders, torso and arms to predict the reaching actions. Children, in contrast, used cues in the arms and torso but not in the head or shoulders to predict the actions. These results provide evidence for a qualitative change in the ability to respond rapidly to predictive cues to others’ actions from childhood to adulthood. Despite humans’ sensitivity to action goals even in infancy, cues from the head and body do not influence children’s rapid action predictions in interactive settings as late as 8 years of age.

Hierarchical Action Encoding Within the Human Brain

Humans are able to interact with objects with extreme flexibility. To achieve this ability, the brain does not only control specific muscular patterns, but it also needs to represent the abstract goal of an action, irrespective of its implementation. It is debated, however, how abstract action goals are implemented in the brain. To address this question, we used multivariate pattern analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Human participants performed grasping actions (precision grip, whole hand grip) with two different wrist orientations (canonical, rotated), using either the left or right hand. This design permitted to investigate a hierarchical organization consisting of three levels of abstraction: 1) “concrete action” encoding; 2) “effector-dependent goal” encoding (invariant to wrist orientation); and 3) “effector-independent goal” encoding (invariant to effector and wrist orientation). We found that motor cortices hosted joint encoding of concrete actions and of effector-dependent goals, while the parietal lobe housed a convergence of all three representations, comprising action goals within and across effectors. The left lateral occipito-temporal cortex showed effector-independent goal encoding, but no convergence across the three levels of representation. Our results support a hierarchical organization of action encoding, shedding light on the neural substrates supporting the extraordinary flexibility of human hand behavior.

The Boulder Breakup

The City of Boulder, Colorado has for 10 years attempted to break up with its electric utility, Xcel Energy, in favor of forming its own municipal utility. Environmental proponents of the separation argue that a democratically accountable, local utility would be better suited to achieve Boulder's ambitious environmental and climate action goals. However, other environmentalists disagree and instead argue that Xcel Energy is a willing and capable environmental partner. This case examines this conflict in order to illustrate a divide in Boulder's environmental community, which mirrors a divide in the larger environmental movement, between structural environmentalists on the one hand and neoliberal environmentalists on the other. The case offers a review of the theoretical work that informs these conflicting perspectives. Finally, it analyzes structural and neoliberal sentiments expressed in the opinion pages of the city's newspaper in order to demonstrate how they intervene and shape Colorado electricity politics.

Mindreading in the balance: adults' mediolateral leaning and anticipatory looking foretell others’ action preparation in a false-belief interactive task

Anticipatory looking on mindreading tasks can indicate our expectation of an agent's action. The challenge is that social situations are often more complex, involving instances where we need to track an agent's false belief to successfully identify the outcome to which an action is directed. If motor processes can guide how action goals are understood, it is conceivable—where that kind of goal ascription occurs in false-belief tasks—for motor representations to account for someone's belief-like state. Testing adults ( N = 42) in a real-time interactive helping scenario, we discovered that participants' early mediolateral motor activity (leftwards–rightwards leaning on balance board) foreshadowed the agent's belief-based action preparation. These results suggest fast belief-tracking can modulate motor representations generated in the course of one's interaction with an agent. While adults' leaning, and anticipatory looking, revealed the contribution of fast false-belief tracking, participants did not correct the agent's mistake in their final helping action. These discoveries suggest that adults may not necessarily use another's belief during overt social interaction or find reflecting on another's belief as being normatively relevant to one's own choice of action. Our interactive task design offers a promising way to investigate how motor and mindreading processes may be variously integrated.

Drifting and Directed Minds: The Significance of Mind-Wandering for Mental Action

Perhaps the central question in action theory is this: what ingredient of bodily action is missing in mere behaviour? But what is an analogous question for mental action? I ask the following: what ingredient of active, goal-directed, thought is missing in mind-wandering? I answer that guidance is the missing ingredient that separates mind-wandering and directed thinking. I define mind-wandering as unguided attention. Roughly speaking, attention is guided when you would feel pulled back, were you distracted. In contrast, a wandering attention drifts from topic to topic unchecked. From my discussion of mind-wandering, I extract general lessons about the causal basis, experiential character, and limits of mental action. Mind-wandering is a case study that allows us to tease apart two causal bases of mental action––guidance and motivation––that often track together and are thus easy to conflate. The contrast between mind-wandering and active thinking also sheds light on how goals are experienced during mental action. Goals are rarely the objects of awareness; rather, goals are “phenomenological frames” that carve experience into felt distractions (which we are guided away from) and relevant information (which we are guided towards). Finally, I account for a puzzling case of mental action that psychologists call “intentional mind-wandering”.