This article presents a follow-up examination of 10 iterations of a blended course on educational psychology and e-learning carried out at the University of Bari. All iterations of the course considered in this study were designed using the Constructive and Collaborative Participation (CCP) model. Our main research questions are: What are the students’ long lasting memories of this course? How do the students use the skills and the competences acquired through the course across an extended period of time? In line (...) with these research questions, the aims of this investigation can be summarized as follows: i) to understand the students’ perceptions and long lasting memories of the course and (ii) to investigate the transfer of skills and knowledge across an extended period of time, based on a self-reported survey. The analysis was carried out by administering the survey to all 196 students who took part in the course in the 2005-2015 decade. 96 participants responded to the survey. The survey is designed to collect data in two areas. First, the memories related to the course and second, the way skills and content knowledge acquired during the course have been transferred to and used in other contexts after the course ended. The data were analyzed using a mixed methods approach, which revealed trends in the responses across the decade. In general, participants remembered the teaching methodology and often recalled specific activities such as Role Taking and the creation of products through group-work. These activities and approaches seemed to provide significant learning opportunities for the students. Several students also recalled key concepts and content knowledge acquired during the course. In relation to transfer of skills, participants tended to reuse mostly transversal skills, such as communicative and organizational skills, especially in work contexts. Further, about half of the respondents reused the content knowledge of the course. This analysis is valuable because it allows us to understand the aspects of the model that are significant for the students in the long term, and to discover and interrogate the acquisition and transfer of skills useful for the students’ personal and professional lives beyond the academy. (shrink)

Jaswal & Akhtar in their target article convincingly argue that subjects with autism do not have diminished social motivation. However, they still recognize that autistic people behave socially in an unusual way. Why? Here we suggest that these behaviours are the results of a multisensory integration deficit. Viewed from this perspective, the assumption that autistic people's unusual behaviours indicate diminished social motivation has to be replaced by the one that they have diminished social prediction skills.

In this commentary on Bastin et al., we suggest that spatial context plays a critical role in the encoding and retrieval of events. Specifically, the translation process between the viewpoint-independent content of a memory and the viewpoint-dependent stimuli activating the retrieval plays a critical role in spatial memory recollection. This perspective also provides an explanatory model for pathological disturbances such as Alzheimer's disease.

Traditional Informed Consent is becoming increasingly inadequate, especially in the context of research biobanks. How much information is needed by patients for their consent to be truly informed? How does the quality of the information they receive match up to the quality of the information they ought to receive? How can information be conveyed fairly about future, non-predictable lines of research? To circumvent these difficulties, some scholars have proposed that current consent guidelines should be reassessed, with trust being used as (...) a guiding principle instead of information. Here, we analyse one of these proposals, based on a Participation Pact, which is already being offered to patients at the Istituto Europeo di Oncologia, a comprehensive cancer hospital in Milan, Italy. (shrink)

We present a generalization of the problem of pattern recognition to arbitrary probabilistic models. This version deals with the problem of recognizing an individual pattern among a family of different species or classes of objects which obey probabilistic laws which do not comply with Kolmogorov’s axioms. We show that such a scenario accommodates many important examples, and in particular, we provide a rigorous definition of the classical and the quantum pattern recognition problems, respectively. Our framework allows for the introduction of (...) non-trivial correlations between the different species involved, opening the door to a new way of harnessing these physical resources for solving pattern recognition problems. Finally, we present some examples and discuss the computational complexity of the quantum pattern recognition problem, showing that the most important quantum computation algorithms can be described as non-Kolmogorovian pattern recognition problems. (shrink)

We support the idea of applying cultural evolution theory to the study of storytelling, and fiction in particular. However, we suggest that a more plausible link between real and imaginary worlds is the feeling of “presence” we can experience in both of them: we feel present when we are able to correctly and intuitively enact our embodied predictions.

In this investigation is analyzed the relationship between macroecology and other subdisciplines of ecology in epistemological, ontological and methodological dimensions. Our hypothesis is that it is possible to detect an ontological and epistemological reductive relationship. However, characteristics of this reduction are not clear and we consider that it is necessary to perform new analyses at future in this direction. Finally, we detect important methodological and ontological coincidences between macroecological and physiological subdisciplines.

Studying trust in the context of human-robot interaction is of great importance given the increasing relevance and presence of robotic agents in the social sphere, including educational and clinical. We investigated the acquisition, loss and restoration of trust when preschool and school-age children played with either a human or a humanoid robot in-vivo. The relationship between trust and the representation of the quality of attachment relationships, Theory of Mind, and executive function skills was also investigated. Additionally, to outline children’s beliefs (...) about the mental competencies of the robot, we further evaluated the attribution of mental states to the interactive agent. In general, no substantial differences were found in children’s trust in the play-partner as a function of agency (human or robot). Nevertheless, 3-years-olds showed a trend toward trusting the human more than the robot, as opposed to 7-years-olds, who displayed the reverse pattern. These findings align with results showing that, for 3 and 7-year-olds, the cognitive ability to switch was significantly associated with trust restoration in the human and the robot, respectively. Additionally, supporting previous findings, we found a dichotomy between attributions of mental states to the human and robot and children’s behavior: while attributing to the robot significantly lower mental states than the human, in the trusting game children behaved in a similar way when they related to the human and the robot. Altogether, the results of this study highlight that similar psychological mechanisms are at play when children are to establish a novel trustful relationship with a human and robot partner. Furthermore, the findings shed light on the interplay – during development – between children’s quality of attachment relationships and the development of a Theory of Mind, which act differently on trust dynamics as a function of the children’s age as well as the interactive partner’s nature (human vs. robot). (shrink)

Movement perception and its role in aesthetic experience have been often studied, within empirical aesthetics, in relation to the human body. No such specificity has been defined in neuroimaging studies with respect to contents lacking a human form. The aim of this work was to explore, through functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), how perceived movement is processed during the aesthetic judgment of paintings using two types of content: human subjects and scenes of nature. Participants, untutored in the arts, were shown the (...) stimuli and asked to make aesthetic judgments. Additionally, they were instructed to observe the paintings and to rate their perceived movement in separate blocks. Observation highlighted spontaneous processes associated with aesthetic experience, whereas movement judgment outlined activations specifically related to movement processing. The ratings recorded during aesthetic judgment revealed that nature scenes received higher scored than human content paintings. The imaging data showed similar activation, relative to baseline, for all stimuli in the three tasks, including activation of occipito-temporal areas, posterior parietal and premotor cortices. Contrast analyses within aesthetic judgment task showed that human content activated, relative to nature, precuneus, fusiform gyrus and posterior temporal areas, whose activation was prominent for dynamic human paintings. In contrast, nature scenes activated, relative to human stimuli, occipital and posterior parietal cortex/precuneus, involved in visuospatial exploration and pragmatic coding of movement, as well as central insula. Static nature paintings further activated, relative to dynamic nature stimuli, central and posterior insula. Besides insular activation, which was specific for aesthetic judgment, we found a large overlap in the activation pattern characterizing each stimulus dimension (content and dynamism) across observation, aesthetic judgment and movement judgment tasks. These findings support the idea that the aesthetic evaluation of artworks depicting both human subjects and nature scenes involves a motor component, and that the associated neural processes occur quite spontaneously in the viewer. Furthermore, considering the functional roles of posterior and central insula, we suggest that nature paintings may evoke aesthetic processes requiring an additional proprioceptive and sensori-motor component implemented by “motor accessibility” to the represented scenario, which is needed to judge the aesthetic value of the observed painting. (shrink)

Conciliatory views on disagreement claim that one should “split the difference” between the epistemic peers’ opinions. Nevertheless, when they apply to the disagreement on conciliatory positions themselves, they give incoherent instructions. A semi-conciliatory position is one that accepts that the peers’ opinions are part of the whole body of evidence relevant in these situations. If one adopts this kind of view, all cases that seems to favor conciliatory views can be explained, and without compromising with the anti–intuitive consequences conciliatory positions (...) have. In particular, a semi-conciliatory view is not condemned to give incoherent instructions when applied to disagreement about it. (shrink)

In this investigation is analyzed the relationship between macroecology and other subdisciplines of ecology in epistemological, ontological and methodological dimensions. Our hypothesis is that it is possible to detect an ontological and epistemological reductive relationship. However, characteristics of this reduction are not clear and we consider that it is necessary to perform new analyses at future in this direction. Finally, we detect important methodological and ontological coincidences between macroecological and physiological subdisciplines.

In this essay, the concept of apocalypse, understood as the "end of the world," will be examined within the context of ancient Buddhism and Christianity. The study will focus on the genealogy and use of expressions such as lokanta, lokassa anta ṃ, and lokassa atthaṅgama, as found in the Pāli canon of Buddhism, going on to compare them with Jewish, as well as early Christian, apocalyptic literature, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Epistles of James and Jude, and the Gospels. (...) The goal of this article is to identify points of convergence in the history of these two concepts of apocalypse, foregrounding the central role within both traditions of analogous socio-cultural circumstances that were actually more influential than their respective doctrinal visions. The essay will argue how the ascetic character of early Buddhism and Christianity, reflecting their opposition to the surrounding social order, contributed to the emergence of similar apocalyptic visions. (shrink)

El objetivo principal de este artículo se encuentra orientado a elucidar, desde una perspectiva histórica, cierta influencia que la problemática ambiental tuvo sobre la ecología disciplinar. Para ello, se analizó el periodo que va de la década de 1960 hasta la actualidad. Dos resultados centrales se desprendieron del análisis propuesto y ambos se encontraron mediados por un saber ambiental que emergió junto a la problemática ambiental. El primero, constata una serie de transformaciones fenomenológicas (con el establecimiento de nuevos patrones ecológicos), (...) epistemológicas (con la incorporación de la noción de escala y de la teoría jerárquica) y metodológicas (con la consolidación de los experimentos de mensuración) sobre la matriz de la ecología. El segundo, se vinculó con una continuidad sincrónica entre la problemática ambiental y la ecología disciplinar. Continuidad rastreada por el reconocimiento de una problemática ambiental de orden global. The main objective of this article is to elucidate, from a historical perspective, the influence that environmental issues have had on the discipline of ecology. To this end, the period from the 1960s to the present was examined. The proposed analysis revealed two main results; both were found to be mediated by environmental knowledge that emerged along with environmental issues. The first refers to a series of phenomenological (establishing new ecological patterns), epistemological (incorporating the notion of scale and hierarchical theory) and methodological (consolidating of experiments involving measurements) transformations over the ecology matrix. The second was linked with a synchronic continuity between environmental issues and the discipline of ecology. This continuity was traced by the recognition that environmental issues have global impact. (shrink)

The main objective of this work is to analyze the intention to reduce some areas of Ecology to Physiology. The origin of this research of reduction was done through consolidation of metabolic ecological theory in first years of XXIst century. Considering this objective, general framework was based on the proposal of Sahotra Sarkar.

Desde la década de 1960, con el surgimiento de las problemáticas ambientales, el discurso hegemónico de la ecología es recibido, reproducido y amplificado por una amplia variedad de actores sociales. Aquí, analizaremos un aspecto que consideramos central de este discurso. Nuestro objetivo se dirige a indagar en qué medida la ecología recupera los dualismos y. Nuestra hipótesis de trabajo es que esta disciplina opera mediante un doble movimiento: mientras trae a primer plano el dualismo, simultáneamente, soslaya el dualismo. Bajo este (...) doble movimiento, esperamos mostrar que el discurso ecológico logra despolitizar la naturaleza, relegando a la periferia diferentes formas de concebir el entorno. Nuestro enfoque epistemológico-metodológico descansará sobre una lógica de las distinciones, de aquí que trabajaremos sobre los dualismos mencionados, a partir de la distinción. Finalmente, presentaremos algunas consideraciones sobre el dominio del discurso ecológico y sobre la relevancia de una posición relativista en el contexto internacional de las problemáticas ambientales. (shrink)

Objective: Mindfulness disposition is associated with various psychological factors and prevent emotional distress in chronic diseases. In the present study, we analyzed the key role of mindfulness dispositions in protecting the individual against psychological distress consequent to COVID-19 social distancing and quarantining. Methods: An online survey was launched on March 13, 2020, with 6,412 responses by April 6, 2020. Socio-demographic information, exposure to the pandemic, and quarantining were assessed together with psychological distress and mindfulness disposition. Multivariate linear regression analysis was (...) performed to study the influence of predictive factors on psychological distress and quality of life in Italian responders during the early days of lockdown. Pearson correlations were calculated to study the relations between mindfulness and psychiatric symptoms. Results: Multivariate linear regression run on socio-demographics, COVID-19-related variables, and mindfulness disposition as moderators of overall psychological distress showed that mindfulness was the best predictor of psychological distress (β = -0.504; p =.000). High negative correlations were found between mindfulness disposition and overall Global Severity Index (r = -.637; p =.000), while moderate to high associations were found between mindfulness and all SCL-90 sub-scales. Discussion: Findings showed that high dispositional mindfulness enhances well-being and helps in dealing with stressful situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Mindfulness-based mental training could represent an effective intervention to stem the post-traumatic psychopathological beginnings and preventing the onset of chronic mental disorders. (shrink)