bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Do gender differences in spatial skills mediate gender differences in mathematics among high-ability students?
Authors: Casey M. Beth 
Published: February 2010

AbstractBased on Geary's theory, intelligence may determine which males utilize innate spatial knowledge to inform their mathematical solutions. This may explain why math gender differences occur mainly with higher abilities. In support, we found that mental rotation ability served as a mediator of gender differences on the math Scholastic Assessment Test for two high-ability samples. Our research suggests, however, that environment and biology interact to influence mental rotation abilities.
All sex differences in cognitive ability may be explained by an X-Y homologous gene determining degrees of cerebral asymmetry
Authors: Crow T. J. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractMale superiority in mathematical ability (along with female superiority in verbal fluency) may reflect the operation of an X-Y homologous gene (the right-shift-factor) influencing the relative rates of development of the cerebral hemispheres. Alleles at the locus on the Y chromosome will be selected at a later mean age than alleles on the X, and only by females.
Sex differences in mathematical abllity: Genes, environment, and evolution
Authors: Gillger Jeffrey W. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractGeary proposes a sociobiological hypothesis of how (and why) sex differences in math and spatial skills might have jointly arisen. His distinction between primary and secondary math skills is noteworthy, and in some ways analogous to the closed versus open systems postulated to exist for language. In this commentary issues concerning how genes might affect complex cognitive skills, the interpretation of heritability estimates, and prior research abilites are discussed.
Brain differences, anthropological stories, and educational implications
Authors: Hammer Christy , Dusek R. Valentine 
Published: February 2010

AbstractGeary's anthropological assumptions are questioned as he uses literature influenced by sociobiology to back the claim that Female humans do not engage in environmental orientation. Yet, female gatherers or migrators do need and use spatial skills. Geary's exploration of gender differences in math skills is speculation that hasharmful, ungrounded, and misleading educational implications and applications, particularly in light of research on the status of gender equity in education.
A critic with a different perspective
Authors: Humphreys Lloyd G. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractTo the extent that Geary's theory concerning biologically primary and secondary behaviors depends on factor analytic methods and findings, it is woefully weak. Factors have been mistakenly called primary mental abilities, but the adjective “primary” represents reification of a mathematical dimension defined by correlations. Fleshing out a factor beyond its mathematical properties requires much additional quantitative experimental and correlational research that goes far beyond mere factoring.
Resources dimorphism sexual selection and mathematics achievement
Authors: Kornbrot Diana Eugenie 
Published: February 2010

AbstractGeary's model is a worthy effort, but ambiguous on important issues. It ignores differential resource allocation, although this follows directly from sexual selection via differential parental investment. Dimorphism in primary traits is arbitrarily attributed to sexual selection via intramale competition, rather than direct evolutionary pressures. Dubious predictions are made about the consequences of raising mathematics achievement.
Sex differences and evolutionary by-products
Authors: Wynn Thomas , Tierson Forrest , Palmer Craig 
Published: February 2010

AbstractFrom the perspective of evolutionary theory, we believe it makes more sense to view the sex differences in spatial cognition as being an evolutionary by-product of selection for optimal rates of fetal development. Geary does not convince us that his proposed selective factors operated with “sufficient precision, economy, and efficiency.” Moreover, the archaeological evidence does not support his proposed evolutionary scenario.
On the biology and politics of cognitive sex differences
Authors: Geary David C. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractThe male advantage in certain mathematical domains contributes to the difference in the numbers of males and females that enter math-intensive occupations, which in turn contributes to the sex difference in earnings. Understanding the nature and development of the sex difference in mathematical abilities is accordingly of social as well as scientific concern. A more complete understanding of the biological contributions to these differences can guide research on educational techniques that might someday produce more equal educational outcomes in mathematics and other academic domains.
Dynamics of the brain at global and microscopic scales: Neural networks and the EEG
Authors: Wright J. J. , Liley D. T. J. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractThere is some complementarity of models for the origin of the electroencephalogram (EEG) and neural network models for information storage in brainlike systems. From the EEG models of Freeman, of Nunez, and of the authors' group we argue that the wavelike processes revealed in the EEG exhibit linear and near-equilibrium dynamics at macroscopic scale, despite extremely nonlinear – probably chaotic – dynamics at microscopic scale. Simulations of cortical neuronal interactions at global and microscopic scales are then presented. The simulations depend on anatomical and physiological estimates of synaptic densities, coupling symmetries, synaptic gain, dendritic time constants, and axonal delays. It is shown that the frequency content, wave velocities, frequency/wavenumber spectra and response to cortical activation of the electrocorticogram (ECoG) can be reproduced by a “lumped” simulation treating small cortical areas as single-function units. The corresponding cellular neural network simulation has properties that include those of attractor neural networks proposed by Amit and by Parisi. Within the simulations at both scales, sharp transitions occur between low and high cell firing rates. These transitions may form a basis for neural interactions across scale. To maintain overall cortical dynamics in the normal low firing-rate range, interactions between the cortex and the subcortical systems are required to prevent runaway global excitation. Thus, the interaction of cortex and subcortex via corticostriatal and related pathways may partly regulate global dynamics by a principle analogous to adiabatic control of artificial neural networks.
Comparative reduction of theories — or over-simplification?
Authors: Koerner Edgar 
Published: February 2010

AbstractTo model the organization of levels' of cortical dynamics, at least some general scheme for hierarchy, functional diversity, and proper intrinsic control must be provided. Rhythmic control forces the system to iterate its state by short trajectories, which makes it much more stable and predictable without discarding the desirable ability of chaotic systems to make rapid phase transitions. Rhythmic control provides a fundamentally different systems dynamics, one not provided by models that allow the emergence of continuous trajectories in the systems state space.
Neuromodulation can significantly change the dynamical state of cortical networks
Authors: Liljenström Hans 
Published: February 2010

AbstractWe present simulation results of an olfactory cortex model complementing the results presented in Wright & Liley's target article. We show how the cortical dynamics as expressed in EEG can be regulated by neuromodulation and discuss how the system can attain global stability without cortical-subcortical interaction, as presumed necessary by Wright & Liley. Network structure is shown to be crucial.
Chaos in induced rhythms of the brain – the value of ERP studies
Authors: Molnár Márk 
Published: February 2010

AbstractEvent-related potentials (ERPs) – neglected almost entirely by Wright & Liley – allow objective investigation of information processing in the brain. The application of chaos theory to such an analysis broadens this possibility. Through the use of the point correlation dimension (PD2) accurate dimensional analysis of different Event-Related Potential components such as the P3 wave is possible.
Rhythmicity in the EEG and global stabilization of the average level of excitation in the cerebral cortex
Authors: Zhadin M. N. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractThe network model of EEG formation has revealed a unified mechanism for disparate EEG phenomena: for various reactions as well as for ontogenetic and phylogenetic differences. EEG rhythmicity was shown to be an external manifestation of the functioning of the intracortical stabilizing system which provides normal informational operations in the cerebral cortex.
On the description of the prescription
Authors: Beyth-Marom Ruth 
Published: February 2010

AbstractBarons's target article approaches errors in decision-making by defining three kinds of models: normative, descriptive, and prescriptive. Baron's prescriptive model is at the center of this commentary. From a theoretical perspective, is Baron's prescriptive model a set of rules through which one can move from the descriptive to the normative? Or is it a practical goal one can achieve as opposed to a normative unachievable theoretical ideal? Delineating an efficient prescriptive account for decision making necessarily depends on a very specific normative model. However, Baron's normative consequentialism model is too general to enable adequate prescriptive accounts.
Decentered thought and consequentialist decision making
Authors: Stanovich Keith E. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractNear the end of his target article, Baron argues that we need to address the question of how to conduct education in consequentialist decision making. However, recent trends in education have deemphasized and denigrated decentered and decontextualized thought. It is argued here that perspective decentering and decontextualized thinking are absolutely essential to the development of consequentialist reasoning.
Situated cognition, prescriptive theory, evolution, and something
Authors: Baron Jonathan 
Published: February 2010

AbstractThis response agrees with Stanovich's emphasis on the need for decentering, and, in response to Beyth-Marom, attempts to clarify the normative-prescriptive-descriptive distinction and point in the direction of prescriptive models. It takes issue with Cabanac and with Lindsay & Gorayska.
Resolving the contradictions of addiction
Authors: Heyman Gene M. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractResearch findings on addiction are contradictory. According to biographical records and widely used diagnostic manuals, addicts use drugs compulsively, meaning that drug use is out of control and independent of its aversive consequences. This account is supported by studies that show significant heritabilities for alcoholism and other addictions and by laboratory experiments in which repeated administration of addictive drugs caused changes in neural substrates associated with reward. Epidemiological and experimental data, however, show that the consequences of drug consumption can significantly modify drug intake in addicts. The disease model can account for the compulsive features of addiction, but not occasions in which price and punishment reduced drug consumption in addicts. Conversely, learning models of addiction can account for the influence of price and punishment, but not compulsive drug taking. The occasion for this target article is that recent developments in behavioral choice theory resolve the apparent contradictions in the addiction literature. The basic argument includes the following four statements: First, repeated consumption of an addictive drug decreases its future value and the future value of competing activities. Second, the frequency of an activity is a function of its relative (not absolute) value. This implies that an activity that reduces the values of competing behaviors can increase in frequency even if its own value also declines. Third, a recent experiment (Heyman & Tanz 1995) shows that the effective reinforcement contingencies are relative to a frame of reference, and this frame of reference can change so as to favor optimal or suboptimal choice. Fourth, if the frame of reference is local, reinforcement contingencies will favor excessive drug use, but if the frame of reference is global, the reinforcement contingencies will favor controlled drug use. The transition from a global to a local frame of reference explains relapse and other compulsive features of addiction.
How do people choose between local and global bookkeeping?
Authors: Ainslie George 
Published: February 2010

AbstractThe matching law accounts for both addictive behavior and the usefulness of a person's evaluating choices in overall categories. To explain why overall bookkeeping, once learned, does not easily win out over local bookkeeping, another implication of matching is needed: intertemporal bargaining. The role of melioration, though probably important for new addiction is separate.
Matching and melioration as accounts of reinforcement and drug addiction
Authors: Branch Marc N. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractHeyman's view that addiction can be viewed as a natural outcome predictable by melioration and the matching law is provocative. Remaining to be explained more fully, however, are exactly how his view is an improvement on other reinforcement-based accounts. Included in these elaborations should be an account of how different “bookkeeping schemes” are developed and controlled and what new approaches to treatment and prevention of drug addiction are indicated.
A scientific fix for the classical account of addiction
Authors: Foss Jeffrey 
Published: February 2010

AbstractHeyman's two crucial theses are that people over-value immediate rewards, and that addictive substances “subvert the value of competing commodities.” These perennial ideas were discussed by Plato. Whereas Heyman provides scientific clarification and support for the first, the second remains problematic. I outline how this deficiency might be remedied via evolutionary considerations.
Behavioral choice theory can enhance our understanding of drug dependence and other behavioral disorders
Authors: Higgins Stephen T. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractI support the major theme of Heyman's target article that behavioral choice theory can enhance our understanding of drug dependence, but I raise concerns about the critique of the operant model of drug dependence, the underscoring of melioration to the exclusion of other theories of choice, and assertions about the unique effects of drug reinforcement.
An economic perspective on addiction and matching
Authors: Laibson David I. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractEconomic models of addiction are choice-based. These models push the choice paradigm too far by modeling addiction as rational, normative behavior. Heyman's target article provides a sensible alternative to this economic approach by emphasizing that addiction is characterized by ambivalence and a perceived loss of self control. However, matching may not be a satisfactory platform on which to build this alternative model. Matching experiments do not provide evidence of ambivalence or perceived loss of self control.
Is melioration the addiction theory of choice?
Authors: MacCoun Robert J. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractHeyman makes a convincing case that a melioration choice strategy is sufficient to produce addictive behavior. But given a plethora of addiction theories, the question is whether melioration theory is superior to rivals more sophisticated than a simple disease model or operant conditioning account. Heyman offers little direct evidence that melioration actually causes the addictions we observe.
Positive reinforcement, the matching law and morality
Authors: McKim William A. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractAddictive behavior has never seemed rational because it persists in spite of drastic aversive consequences. This is a particular problem for models of addiction such as operant psychology which hold that behavior is controlled by its consequences. Inspite of claims to the contrary, Heymans target article illustrates how operant psychology resolves this contradiction. By using the matching law, Heyman suggests a mechanism that explains why delayed aversive events may not control behavior, and a conceptual framework in which we can understand successful therapies.
Maximization should sometimes lead to abstinence
Authors: Mitchell Suzanne H. , Baum William M. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractHeyman's model, paradoxically, predicts that whereas a maximizing approach to drug choice will prevent escalation of drug use it will never yield complete abstinence. We suggest an alternative model that overcomes this difficulty by focusing on changes in drug tolerance. A small modification allows maximization to predict either abstinence or moderation (e.g., social drinking).
Addiction requires philosophical explanation, not mere redescription
Authors: Perring Christian 
Published: February 2010

AbstractHeyman's model explains the irrationality of addictive behavior, but it does not satisfactorily answer the question of whether this behavior is voluntary because it does not address the issue of the choice of preference functions. Furthermore, although Heyman disconfirms the disease model of addiction, this does not resolve the issue of whether addiction should be classified as a mental illness.
The pursuit of value: sensitization or tolerance?
Authors: Robinson Terry E. , Berridge Kent C. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractTwo issues are raised. (1) What is the nature of the drug effect Heyman thinks confers value to drugs? (2) What is the evidence that drug use decreases the value of drugs and of conventional incentives over the long-term? There is considerable evidence for the opposite; a persistent increase in the sensitivity of neural systems that mediate drug value.
Heyman's steady-state theory of addiction
Authors: Vyse Stuart A. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractHeyman's target article contributes to our understanding of addictions by offering solutions to several paradoxes and by recognizing the stable nature of addictive behavior. Previous classical and operant conditioning models have emphasized molecular processes, such as acquisition and extinction, and have failed to address the aggregate effects of long-term exposure to the contingencies of drug and alcohol use.
Innateness, autonomy, universality? Neurobiological approaches to language
Authors: Müller Ralph-Axel 
Published: February 2010

AbstractThe concepts of the innateness, universality, species-specificity, and autonomy of the human language capacity have had an extreme impact on the psycholinguistic debate for over thirty years. These concepts are evaluated from several neurobiological perspectives, with an emphasis on the emergence of language and its decay due to brain lesion and progressive brain disease.Evidence of perceptuomotor homologies and preadaptations for human language in nonhuman primates suggests a gradual emergence of language during hominid evolution. Regarding ontogeny, the innate component of language capacity is likely to be polygenic and shared with other developmental domains. Dissociations between verbal and nonverbal development are probably rooted in the perceptuomotor specializations of neural substrates rather than the autonomy of a grammar module. Aphasiologicaldata often assumed to suggest modular linguistic subsystems can be accounted for in terms of a neurofunctional model incorporating perceptuomotor-based regional specializationsand distributivity of representations. Thus, dissociations between grammatical functors and content words are due to different conditions of acquisition and resulting differences in neural representation. Human brains are characterized by multifactorial interindividual variability, and strict universality of functional organization is biologically unrealistic.A theoretical alternative is proposed according to which (1) linguistic specialization of brain areas is due to epigenetic and probabilistic maturational events, not to genetic ”hard-wiring,” and (2) linguistic knowledge is neurally represented in distributed cell assemblies whose topography reflects the perceptuomotor modalities involved in the acquisition and use of a given item of knowledge.
An innate language faculty needs neither modularity nor localization
Authors: Bickerton Derek 
Published: February 2010

AbstractMüller misconstrues autonomy to mean strict locality of brain function, something quite different from the functional autonomy that linguists claim. Similarly, he misperceives the interaction of learned and innate components hypothesized in current generative models. Evidence from sign languages, Creole languages, and neurological studies of rare forms of aphasia also argues against his conclusions.
Double dissociation, modularity, and distributed organization
Authors: Bullinaria John A. , Chater Nick 
Published: February 2010

AbstractMüller argues that double dissociations do not imply underlying modularity of the cognitive system, citing neural networks as examples of fully distributed systems that can give rise to double dissociations. We challenge this claim, noting that suchdouble dissociations typically do not “scale-up,” and that even some singledissociations can be difficult to account for in a distributed system.
Pluripotentiality, epigenesis, and language acquisition
Authors: Jacobs Bob , Larsen Lori 
Published: February 2010

AbstractMüller provides a valuable synthesis of neurobiological evidence on the epigenetic development of neural structures involved in language acquisition. The pluripotentiality of developing neural tissue crucially constrains linguistic/cognitive theorizing about supposedly innate neural mechanisms and contributes significantly to our understanding of experience–dependent processes involved in language acquisition. Without this understanding, any proposed explanation of language acquisition is suspect.
Innateness, autonomy, universality, and the neurobiology of regular and irregular inflectional morphology
Authors: Kemmerer David 
Published: February 2010

AbstractMüller's goal of bringing neuroscience to bear on controversies in linguistics is laudable. However, some of his specific proposals about innateness and autonomy are misguided. Recent studies on the neurobiology of regular and irregular inflectional morphology indicate that these two linguistic processes are subserved by anatomically and physiologically distinct neural subsystems, whose functional organization is likely to be under direct genetic control rather than assembled by strictly epigenetic factors.
Neuroanatomical structures and segregated circuits
Authors: Lieberman Philip 
Published: February 2010

AbstractSegregated neural circuits that effect particular domain-specific behaviors can be differentiated from neuroanatomical structures implicated in many different aspects of behavior. The basal ganglionic components of circuits regulating nonlinguistic motor behavior, speech, and syntax all function in a similar manner. Hence, it is unlikely that special properties and evolutionary mechanisms are associated with the neural bases of human language.
Müller's conclusions and linguistic research
Authors: Newmeyer Frederick J. 
Published: February 2010

AbstractBecause Müiller fails to distinguish between two senses of the term “autonomy,” there is a danger that his results will be misinterpreted by both linguists and neuroscientists. Although he may very well have been successful in refuting one sense of autonomy, he may actually have helped to provide an explanation for the correctness of autonomy in its other sense.