Los niños con trastorno por déficit de atención con hiperactividad presentan alteraciones en el desarrollo de la función ejecutiva que se traducen en dificultades del control atencional y de la flexibilidad cognitiva. Considerando la complejidad de los procesos involucrados en la comprensión de lectura y el papel fundamental que en ellos cumple la función ejecutiva, puede esperarse que los niños con TDAH presenten diferencias en su desempeño lector en comparación con sus pares sin TDAH. El presente estudio, de carácter (...) correlacional-predictivo, tiene como propósito determinar si tales diferencias de comprensión lectora existen realmente y si es posible predecirlas a partir de la función ejecutiva. Para ello se seleccionaron 71 escolares de tercer y cuarto año de enseñanza básica y se les evaluó la habilidad de comprensión de lectura, el reconocimiento de palabras, la amplitud de la memoria de trabajo verbal, el control atencional y la velocidad de procesamiento. Con el fin de determinar qué variables tenían capacidad para predecir el nivel de comprensión de los escolares se aplicó un análisis de regresión logística binaria. Los resultados ponen en evidencia que el TDAH afecta significativamente el desempeño lector de los escolares y que las variables vinculadas a la función ejecutiva, especialmente la memoria de trabajo, son buenos predictores del rendimiento en comprensión de lectura. (shrink)

This ground-breaking book brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to discuss the control and coordination of processes involved in perceptually guided actions. The research area of motor control has become an increasingly multidisciplinary undertaking. Understanding the acquisition and performance of voluntary movements in biological and artificial systems requires the integration of knowledge from a variety of disciplines from neurophysiology to biomechanics.

Mental control refers to the ability we have to control our own minds. Its primary expression—attention—has become a popular topic for philosophers in the past few decades, generating the need for a primer on the concept. It is related to self-control, which typically refers to the maintenance of preferred behavior in the face of temptation. While a distinct concept, criticisms of self-control can also be applied to mental control, such as that it implies the existence (...) of an unscientific homunculus-like agent or is not a natural kind. Yet, as this Element suggests, a scientifically-grounded account of mental control remains possible. The manuscript is organized into five main sections, which cover 1) the concept of mental control, 2) the relationship between mental control and attention, 3) the phenomena of meditation and mindwandering, 4) attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 5) emergence-based accounts of mental control, including an original account by the author. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that luck excludes control-more precisely, that an event is lucky for you only if that event lies beyond your control. Call this the Lack of Control Requirement (LCR) on luck. Jennifer Lackey [2008] has recently argued that there is no such requirement on luck. Should such an argument succeed, it would (among other things) disable a main objection to the "libertarian" position in the free will debate. After clarifying the LCR, I defend it against (...) both Lackey's argument and a novel argument different in kind from Lackey's. I undermine each of these arguments by sketching a plausible error theory for its key intuition. For each argument, there's a natural reply available to its proponents. I show that these natural replies depend on certain mistaken general principles about luck. Neither Lackey's argument nor the novel argument I consider casts serious doubt on the LCR. [Word count: 147]. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite widespread attention to corruption and organizational change in the literature, to our knowledge, no research has attempted to understand the linkages between these two powerful organizational phenomena. Accordingly, we draw on major theories in ethics, sociology, and management to develop a theoretical framework for understanding how organizational change can sometimes generate corruption. We extend anomie theory and ethical climate theory to articulate the deinstitutionalization of the normative control system and argue that, through this deinstitutionalization, organizations have the potential (...) to become incubators for corruption. We qualify this process by proposing conditions more ripe for anomie and under which this deinstitutionalization is more likely to occur, propounding moderating relationships that influence organizational reconfiguration. Examples of turbulence in the contemporary business environment that can trigger change highlight our discussion. We conclude with managerial implications, offering means by which the deleterious effects of corruption may be arrested or controlled. (shrink)

Cognitive control has long been one of the most active areas of computational modeling work in cognitive science. The focus on computational models as a medium for specifying and developing theory predates the PDP books, and cognitive control was not one of the areas on which they focused. However, the framework they provided has injected work on cognitive control with new energy and new ideas. On the occasion of the books' anniversary, we review computational modeling in the (...) study of cognitive control, with a focus on the influence that the PDP approach has brought to bear in this area. Rather than providing a comprehensive review, we offer a framework for thinking about past and future modeling efforts in this domain. We define control in terms of the optimal parameterization of task processing. From this vantage point, the development of control systems in the brain can be seen as responding to the structure of naturalistic tasks, through the filter of the brain systems with which control directly interfaces. This perspective lays open a set of fascinating but difficult research questions, which together define an important frontier for future computational research. (shrink)

Andrei Marmor has recently offered a narrow interpretation of the right to privacy as a right to having a reasonable amount of control over one's self‐presentation. He claims that the interest people have in preventing others from abusing their personal information to do harm is not directly protected by the right to privacy. This article rejects that claim and defends a view according to which concerns about abuse play a central role in fleshing out the appropriate scope of a (...) general right to privacy. (shrink)

The leading idea of our theory of moral responsibility is that responsibility is associated with control. But we contend that there are two distinct kinds of control. Regulative control involves alternative possibilities: it is a kind of dual power of free action. In contrast, guidance control does not, by its nature, involve alternative possibilities. Whereas typically it might be thought that regulative and guidance control go together, the Frankfurt-type cases show that they are separate and (...) distinct sorts of control. And, whereas typically it is thought that moral responsibility requires regulative control, we claim that moral responsibility—for actions, omissions, and consequences—simply requires guidance control. Thus, although we do not believe that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities, we preserve the traditional association of moral responsibility with control. (shrink)

What is the role of conscious visual experience in the control and guidance of human behaviour? According to some recent treatments, the role is surprisingly indirect. Conscious visual experience, on these accounts, serves the formation of plans and the selection of action types and targets, while the control of 'online' visually guided action proceeds via a quasi-independent non-conscious route. In response to such claims, critics such as (Wallhagen [2007], pp. 539-61) have suggested that the notions of control (...) and guidance invoked are unacceptably vague, and that that the image of 'zombie systems' guiding action fails to take account of the possibility that there is genuine but unconceptualized, unnoticed, and/or unreportable experience taking place and guiding or controlling the actions. I address both sets of concerns. I try to show that refining and clarifying the key notions of control and guidance leaves the original argument intact, as does the appeal to unconceptualized, unnoticed, or unreportable experiences. The exercise serves, however, to highlight an important complex of considerations concerning the relations between control, agency, and experience. Better understanding these relations is, I suggest, an important source of insights concerning the nature of phenomenal experience. (shrink)

The Representational Theory of the Mind allows for psychological explanations couched in terms of the contents of propositional attitudes. Propositional attitudes themselves are taken to be relations to mental representations. These representations (partially) determine the contents of the attitudes in which they figure. Thus, Representationalism owes an explanation of the contents of mental representations. This essay constitutes an atomistic theory of the content of formally or syntactically simple mental representation, proposing that the content of such a representation is determined by (...) the intersection of the representation's correlational and control properties. The theory is distinguished from standard information-based accounts of mental content in allowing that the relevant correlations be contingent while insisting on an efferent aspect to mental content. The theory on offer allows for a natural explanation of misrepresentation, finds a niche for the notion of narrow content, welcomes radical first person fallibility with respect to questions of content, admits of mental ambiguity and recognizes that the future of a psychological agent is a factor in determining the content of the agent's present psychological states. (shrink)

I explore the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics by treating the former as a control theory: a theory of which transitions between states can be induced on a system by means of operations from a fixed list. I recover the results of standard thermodynamics in this framework on the assumption that the available operations do not include measurements which affect subsequent choices of operations. I then relax this assumption and use the framework to consider the vexed questions of (...) Maxwell's demon and Landauer's principle. Throughout I assume rather than prove the basic irreversibility features of statistical mechanics, taking care to distinguish them from the conceptually distinct assumptions of thermodynamics proper. (shrink)

The last decade has witnessed the mass distribution and adoption of smart home systems and devices powered by artificial intelligence systems ranging from household appliances like fridges and toasters to more background systems such as air and water quality controllers. The pervasiveness of these sociotechnical systems makes analyzing their ethical implications necessary during the design phases of these devices to ensure not only sociotechnical resilience, but to design them for human values in mind and thus preserve meaningful human control (...) over them. This paper engages in a conceptual investigations of how meaningful human control over smart home devices can be attained through design. The value sensitive design (VSD) approach is proposed as a way of attaining this level of control. In the proposed framework, values are identified and defined, stakeholder groups are investigated and brought into the design process and the technical constraints of the technologies in question are considered. The paper concludes with some initial examples that illustrate a more adoptable way forward for both ethicists and engineers of smart home devices. (shrink)

It is well known that on the Internet, computer algorithms track our website browsing, clicks, and search history to infer our preferences, interests, and goals. The nature of this algorithmic tracking remains unclear, however. Does it involve what many cognitive scientists and philosophers call ‘mindreading’, i.e., an epistemic capacity to attribute mental states to people to predict, explain, or influence their actions? Here I argue that it does. This is because humans are in a particular way embedded in the process (...) of algorithmic tracking. Specifically, if we endorse common conditions for extended cognition, then human mindreading (by website operators and users) is often literally extended into, that is, partly realized by, not merely causally coupled to, computer systems performing algorithmic tracking. The view that human mindreading extends outside the body into computers in this way has significant ethical advantages. It points to new conceptual ways to reclaim our autonomy and privacy in the face of increasing risks of computational control and online manipulation. These benefits speak in favor of endorsing the notion of extended mindreading. (shrink)

A novel fuzzy control scheme with adaptation algorithms is developed for robot manipulators’ system. At the beginning, one adjustable parameter is introduced in the fuzzy logic system, the robot manipulators system with uncertain nonlinear terms as the master device and a reference model dynamic system as the slave robot system. To overcome the limitations such as online learning computation burden and logic structure in conventional fuzzy logic systems, a parameter should be used in fuzzy logic system, which composes fuzzy (...) logic system with updated parameter laws, and can be formed for a new fashioned adaptation algorithms controller. The error closed-loop dynamical system can be stabilized based on Lyapunov analysis, the number of online learning computation burdens can be reduced greatly, and the different kinds of fuzzy logic systems with fuzzy rules or without any fuzzy rules are also suited. Finally, effectiveness of the proposed approach has been shown in simulation example. (shrink)

Plagiarism is a problematic issue in universities across the globe (Curtis & Vardanega, 2016 ). This study explored the relationship between negative emotionality and positive attitudes toward plagiarism through the mediation of academic self-efficacy and self-control. Negative emotionality was examined as three components: stress, anxiety, and depression. Self-report surveys were completed by 454 university students to investigate the relationship between negative emotionality and positive attitudes toward plagiarism, as well as the mediating role of academic self-efficacy and self-control in (...) this relationship. The hierarchical multiple regression found that negative emotionality significantly predicted positive attitudes toward plagiarism over and above age and gender (i.e., where male students and younger students were more likely to plagiarise). Furthermore, three mediation analyses showed that academic self-efficacy and self-control mediate the relationship between positive attitudes toward plagiarism and each component of negative emotionality. Considering these results, subsequent research should investigate whether implementing strategies that alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression could increase academic self-efficacy and self-control, which in turn, could then reduce positive attitudes toward plagiarism. (shrink)

Parallel language activation in bilinguals leads to competition between languages. Experience managing this interference may aid novel language learning by improving the ability to suppress competition from known languages. To investigate the effect of bilingualism on the ability to control native-language interference, monolinguals and bilinguals were taught an artificial language designed to elicit between-language competition. Partial activation of interlingual competitors was assessed with eye-tracking and mouse-tracking during a word recognition task in the novel language. Eye-tracking results showed that monolinguals (...) looked at competitors more than bilinguals, and for a longer duration of time. Mouse-tracking results showed that monolinguals’ mouse movements were attracted to native-language competitors, whereas bilinguals overcame competitor interference by increasing the activation of target items. Results suggest that bilinguals manage cross-linguistic interference more effectively than monolinguals. We conclude that language interference can affect lexical retrieval, but bilingualism may reduce this interference by facilitating access to a newly learned language. (shrink)

Much research on intelligent systems has concentrated on low level mechanisms or sub-systems of restricted functionality. We need to understand how to put all the pieces together in an *architecture* for a complete agent with its own mind, driven by its own desires. A mind is a self-modifying control system, with a hierarchy of levels of control, and a different hierarchy of levels of implementation. AI needs to explore alternative control architectures and their implications for human, animal, (...) and artificial minds. Only within the framework of a theory of actual and possible architectures can we solve old problems about the concept of mind and causal roles of desires, beliefs, intentions, etc. The high level ``virtual machine'' architecture is more useful for this than detailed mechanisms. E.g. the difference between connectionist and symbolic implementations is of relatively minor importance. A good theory provides both explanations and a framework for systematically generating concepts of possible states and processes. Lacking this, philosophers cannot provide good analyses of concepts, psychologists and biologists cannot specify what they are trying to explain or explain it, and psychotherapists and educationalists are left groping with ill-understood problems. The paper sketches some requirements for such architectures, and analyses an idea shared between engineers and philosophers: the concept of ``semantic information''. (shrink)

This paper offers a conceptual framework which (re)integrates goal-directed control, motivational processes, and executive functions, and suggests a developmentalpathway from situated action to higher level cognition. We first illustrate a basic computational (control-theoretic) model of goal-directed action that makes use of internalmodeling. We then show that by adding the problem of selection among multiple actionalternatives motivation enters the scene, and that the basic mechanisms of executivefunctions such as inhibition, the monitoring of progresses, and working memory, arerequired for this (...) system to work. Further, we elaborate on the idea that the off-line re-enactment of anticipatory mechanisms used for action control gives rise to (embodied)mental simulations, and propose that thinking consists essentially in controlling mental simulations rather than directly controlling behavior and perceptions. We concludeby sketching an evolutionary perspective of this process, proposing that anticipationleveraged cognition, and by highlighting specific predictions of our model. (shrink)

This is not a scholarly research paper, but a ‘position paper’ outlining an approach to the study of mind which has been gradually evolving since about 1969 when I first become acquainted with work in Artificial Intelligence through Max Clowes. I shall try to show why it is more fruitful to construe the mind as a control system than as a computational system.

Human control of action in routine situations involves a flexible interplay between (a) task-dependent serial ordering constraints; (b) top-down, or intentional, control processes; and (c) bottom-up, or environmentally triggered, affordances. In addition, the interaction between these influences is modulated by learning mechanisms that, over time, appear to reduce the need for top-down control processes while still allowing those processes to intervene at any point if necessary or if desired. We present a model of the acquisition and (...) class='Hi'>control of goal-directed action that goes beyond existing models by operationalizing an interface between two putative systems—a routine and a non-routine system—thereby demonstrating how explicitly represented goals can interact with the emergent task representations that develop through learning in the routine system. The gradual emergence of task representations offers an explanation for the transfer of control with experience from the non-routine goal-based system to the routine system. At the same time it allows action selection to be sensitive both to environmental triggers and to biasing from multiple levels within the goal system. (shrink)

Rent control is an economic abomination. It diverts investments away from residential rent units, it leads to their deterioration, it is responsible for urban decay such as in the South Bronx, it does not help poor tenants, it is a horrendous means of income redistribution. Yet this economic regulation is beloved of intellectuals (hot beds of pro rent control sentiment are Berkeley, Ann Arbor and Cambridge) particularly in the legal and philosophical communities. The present article is dedicated to (...) an exploration and rejection of the arguments in behalf of rent control which emanate from this source. (shrink)

In `Underestimating Self-Control' (1997a), I argued that Jeanette Kennett and Michael Smith (1996) underestimate our capacity for synchronic self-control. They argued for a solution to a puzzle about such self-control that features non-actional exercises' of self-control. I argued in response that `a more robust, actional exercise of self-control is open to agents in scenarios of the sort in question' (1997a: 119). They disagree (Kennett and Smith 1997).In Mele 1997a, I resisted the temptation to criticize Kennett (...) and Smith's attempted resolution, because I thought it better to concentrate on sketching an alternative resolution. Here, I will argue that the resolution they offer is problematic and reply to their criticism (1997) of my suggested resolution. (shrink)

The criminalization of femicide in Mexico has been introduced as a tool to address the violence, discrimination, and oppression against women. The criminalization strategy has a symbolic function: going beyond deterring the crime to be used as tool for education. In that sense, the criminalization of femicide emerges as an educational tool used to introduce new principles and societal values, highlighting the reality of discrimination and subordination against women, thereby transforming an individual conduct into a watershed issue worthy of collective (...) condemnation. At the same time, official data reveals that over the past two decades, the rate of murders of women involving firearms has increased by 375%. This highlights the necessity for a comprehensive criminalization strategy that acknowledges the widespread criminal use of firearms as a significant factor in gender-related killings of women. Therefore, to raise awareness (as the femicide laws intend), every policy emanating from the State, or its affiliate institutions must incorporate a gender perspective. This includes specific programs targeting armed gender-based violence, considering the entire weapons cycle, including gun production, their use, and transfer processes. Moreover, this gender-sensitive approach must also acknowledge that the possession of small arms is linked to violent masculinities and that women, beyond being victims, might also play roles as perpetrators of armed violence. The symbolic purpose of femicide laws should then become a platform for developing further appropriate effective policies and strategies to reduce gender-based violence, with special consideration of gendered armed violence. This article will analyze the possibility for extending the symbolic purpose of femicide law to produce a gendered small arms control strategy in Mexico. Considering the educational alternative that the femicide law provides, the following paper will evaluate the criteria needed to develop a comprehensive and intersectional program for gun control in Mexico. (shrink)

This paper takes the vigorous political debate unleashed in Germany by the results of the PISA study as a stimulus to take a closer look at the strategic aims and effects of the current education reforms, of which the PISA study is only one example. It shows that the reform measures underpin a powerful process of normalisation. In this context, the PISA study, along with other reform measures, can be seen as a ‘power stabiliser’. The paper indicates how techniques of (...) political domination are linked with ‘technologies of the self’ and how the ‘discourse of self organization’ can be seen as the core of a governmental strategy to assimilate education more thoroughly than ever before into a network of disciplinary procedures and ‘voluntary self‐control’. (shrink)

This article examines the management of participation in calls to radio phone-in programmes. In the broadcast media, there are increasing occasions for interaction between `professionals' and lay members of the public, particularly within what have come to be known generically as public participation programmes. People call in to phone-in programmes for various reasons; to give opinions, to get advice, and often to ask questions. In the particular phone-ins analysed here, callers are invited to put questions to leading politicians of the (...) day about their election policies. In many institutional contexts for talk the role of questioner has been found to be a more powerful interactional position than the role of answerer. Through an analysis of the organization of the phone-in calls, this article argues that the potentially powerful discourse role of questioner is interactionally `defused' through the participatory framework of the call. The author shows how the mediated interactional structure of these calls limits the range of possible actions available to callers in their institutional position as questioners, and thus produces constraints on what callers can actually achieve in this particular context for institutional talk. (shrink)

After outlining why the notion of conscious control of action matters to us and after distinguishing different challenges to that notion, the contribution focuses on the challenge posed by the literature on unconscious goal pursuit. Based on a conceptual clarification of the notion of consciousness, I argue that the understanding of consciousness in that literature is too restricted. The hypothesis that the behaviors reported can be accounted for by nonconceptual forms of consciousness, such as emotions and motor experiences, rather (...) than by—conscious or unconscious—conceptual level intentions tends to be disregarded, even though it promises to be empirically fruitful. (shrink)

This article looks at the strong links between Deleuze's molecular ontology and the fields of complexity and emergence, and argues that Deleuze's work implies a ‘philosophy of technology’ that is both open and dynamic. Following Simondon and von Uexküll, Deleuze suggests that technical objects are ontologically unstable, and are produced by processes of individuation and self-organization in complex relations with their environment. For Deleuze design is not imposed from without, but emerges from within matter. The fundamental departure for Deleuze, on (...) the basis of such an ontology, is to conceive of modes of relating to the evolution of technology. In this way Deleuze, along with Guattari, provides the basis for an ethics and a politics of becoming and emergent control that constitutes an alternative to the hubris of contemporary reductionist accounts of new areas such as nanotechnology. (shrink)

Emotion is widely agreed to have two dimensions, valence and arousal. Few studies have explored the effect of emotion on conflict adaptation by considering both of these, which could have dissociate influence. The present study aimed to fill the gap as to whether emotional valence and arousal would exert dissociable influence on conflict adaptation. In the experiments, we included positive, neutral, and negative conditions, with comparable arousal between positive and negative conditions. Both positive and negative conditions have higher arousal than (...) neutral ones. In Experiment 1, by using a two-colour-word Flanker task, we found that conflict adaptation was enhanced in both positive and negative contexts compared to a neutral context. Furthermore, this effect still existed when controlling stimulus–response repetitions in Experiment 2, which used a four-colour-word Flanker task. The findings suggest emotional arousal enhances conflict adaptation, regardless of emotional valence. Thus, future studies should consider emotional arousal when studying the effect of emotion on conflict adaptation. Moreover, the unique role of the emotional context in conflict-driven cognitive control is emphasised. (shrink)