Sistemi organizzativi plurimi e discrezionalità decisionale nei servizi per il benessere e la protezione dei minori in Veneto

The decisions taken by social workers in the field of child protection are influenced not only by factors related to the child and his/her life contex but also by organizational-contextual fac-tors of the social service and personal factors of the professionals (Baumann et al., 2011; Fluke et al., 2014; Benbenishity et al., 2015). The present research wanted to investigate how the organizational and professional variables affect the decisions of social workers in the child protection services in the area of the Veneto Region. 3 focus group were conducted, involving 22 social workers working in the protection services of 3 large municipalities in the Veneto Region were interviewed. The results highlight the presence of plural organizational structures and the lack of shared good practices with a shift in the decision axis towards the discretion of individual social worker.

Prefrontal neural dynamics for behavioral decisions and attentional control

ABSTRACTComplex neural dynamics in the prefrontal cortex contribute to context-dependent decisions and attentional competition. To analyze these dynamics, we apply demixed principal component analysis to activity of a primate prefrontal cell sample recorded in a cued target detection task. The results track dynamics of cue and object coding, feeding into movements along a target present-absent decision axis in a low-dimensional subspace of population activity. For a single stimulus, object and cue coding are seen mainly in the contralateral hemisphere. Later, a developing decision code in both hemispheres may reflect interhemispheric communication. With a target in one hemifield and a competing distractor in the other, each hemisphere initially encodes the contralateral object, but finally, decision coding is dominated by the task-relevant target. Tracking complex neural events in a low-dimensional activity subspace illuminates information flow towards task-appropriate behavior, unravelling mechanisms of prefrontal computation.

Prefrontal cortex represents heuristics that shape choice bias and its integration into future behavior

SummaryGoal-directed behavior requires integrating sensory information with prior knowledge about the environment. Behavioral biases that arise from these priors could increase positive outcomes when the priors match the true structure of the environment, but mismatches also happen frequently and could cause unfavorable outcomes. Biases that reduce gains and fail to vanish with training indicate fundamental suboptimalities arising from ingrained heuristics of the brain. Here, we report systematic, gain-reducing choice biases in highly-trained monkeys performing a motion direction discrimination task where only the current stimulus is behaviorally relevant. The monkey’s bias fluctuated at two distinct time scales: slow, spanning tens to hundreds of trials, and fast, arising from choices and outcomes of the most recent trials. Our finding enabled single trial prediction of biases, which influenced the choice especially on trials with weak stimuli. The pre-stimulus activity of neuronal ensembles in the monkey prearcuate gyrus represented these biases as an offset along the decision axis in the state space. This offset persisted throughout the stimulus viewing period, when sensory information was integrated, leading to a biased choice. The pre-stimulus representation of history-dependent bias was functionally indistinguishable from the neural representation of upcoming choice before stimulus onset, validating our model of single-trial biases and suggesting that pre-stimulus representation of choice could be fully defined by biases inferred from behavioral history. Our results indicate that the prearcuate gyrus reflects intrinsic heuristics that compute bias signals, as well as the mechanisms that integrate them into the oculomotor decision-making process.

Handedness may be More Important than Sex as a Variable Underlying Individual Differences in Visual Performance

Evidence is presented that there are individual differences in the early stages of information processing which are due, in part, to the criteria adopted by the left and right hemispheres in perceptual organization. Sex differences were found in organization criteria and in the extent that both hemispheres participate in ordering perceptual experience. Of perhaps greater importance in terms of practical implications, significant and dramatic differences were found in perceptual organization for “extreme right-handers” and “right-handers who tend towards mix-handedness.” “Mixed-handers” of both sexes grouped states into perceptual units to a significantly greater extent than their very right-handed counterparts. A method is described for determining the relative location of grouping criteria on the decision axis.

Interpretation of d' Values Obtained from a Multi-Target Confidence-Rating Procedure

Two Os made identifications and certainty ratings for five Canadian traffic signs under a theory of signal detectability confidence-rating paradigm. The data showed a strategy from the theory of signal detection for the task as a whole but not for each separate target. Rather than referring to five separate signal and noise distributions, Os apparently used a single-decision axis for their judgments. This outcome suggests the need for clarification of the meaning of individual d' values obtained by a multi-target confidence-rating procedure, based on theory of signal detectability.