Psychology

Indigenous Latinx children and youth are a growing population that has been largely invisible in U.S. society and in the scholarly literature (Barillas-Chón, 2010; Machado-Casas, 2009). Indigenous Latinx youth are often assumed to be part of a larger homogenous grouping, usually Hispanic or Latinx, and yet their cultural and linguistic backgrounds do not always converge with dominant racial narratives about what it means to be “Mexican” or “Latinx.” Bonfil Batalla (1987) argued that Indigenous Mexicans are a población negada—or negated population—whose existence has been systematically denied as part of a centuries-long colonial project of indigenismo (indigenism) in Mexico and other Latin American countries. This systematic denial in countries of origin often continues once Indigenous people migrate to the U.S., as they are actively rendered invisible in U.S. schools through the semiotic process of erasure (Alberto, 2017; Urrieta, 2017). Indigenous Latinx families are often also o...

Altered visual exploration of faces likely contributes to social cognition deficits seen in autism. To investigate the relationship between face gaze and social cognition in autism, we measured both face gaze and how facial regions were actually used during emotion judgments from faces. Compared to IQ-matched healthy controls, nine high-functioning adults with autism failed to make use of information from the eye region of faces, instead relying primarily on information from the mouth. Face gaze accounted for the increased reliance on the mouth, and partially accounted for the deficit in using information from the eyes. These findings provide a novel quantitative assessment of how people with autism utilize information in faces when making social judgments.

The barn owl (Tyto alba) is capable of capturing prey by passive hearing alone, guided by a topographic map of auditory space in the external nucleus of its inferior colliculus. The neurons of this auditory space map have discrete spatial receptive fields that result from the computation of interaural differences in the level (ILD) and time-of-arrival (ITD) of sounds. Below we review the synthesis of the spatial receptive fields from the frequency-specific ITDs and ILDs to which the neurons are tuned, concentrating on recent studies exploiting virtual auditory space techniques to analyze the contribution of ILD. We then compared the owl’s spatial discrimination, assessed behaviorally, with that of its space map neurons. Spatial discrimination was assessed using a novel paradigm involving the pupillary dilation response (PDR), and neuronal acuity was assessed by measuring the changes in firing rate resulting from changes in source location, scaled to the variance. This signal-detection-based approach revealed that the change in the position of the neural image on this map best explains the spatial discrimination measured using the PDR. We compare this result to recent studies in mammalian systems.

The activities of six purified Thermomonospora fusca cellulases and Trichoderma reesei CBHI and CBHII were determined on filter paper, swollen cellulose, and CMC. A simple method to measure the soluble and insoluble reducing sugar products from the hydrolysis of filter paper was found to effectively distinguish between exocellulases and endocellulases. Endocellulases produced 34% to 50% insoluble reducing sugar and exocellulases produced less than 8% insoluble reducing sugar. The ability of a wide variety of mixtures of these cellulases to digest 5.2% of a filter paper disc in 16 h was measured quantitatively. The specific activities of the mixtures varied from 0.41 to 16.31 μmol cellobiose per minute per micromole enzyme. The degree of synergism ranged from 0.4 to 7.8. T. reesei CBHII and T. fusca E3 were found to be functionally equivalent in mixtures. The catalytic domains (cd) of T. fusca endocellulases E2 and E5 were purified and found to retain 93% and 100% of their CMC activity, respectively, but neither cd protein could digest filter paper to 5.2%. When E2cd and E5cd were substituted in synergistic mixtures for the native proteins, the mixtures containing E2cd retained 60%, and those containing E5cd retained 94% of the original activity. Addition of a β-glucosidase was found to double the activity of the best synergistic mixture. Addition of CBHI to T. fusca crude cellulase increased its activity on filter paper 1.7-fold. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This paper argues that consideration of moral exemplars may provide a means for integrating insights across philosophical ethics, theological ethics, and the scientific study of moral cognition. Key to this endeavor is an understanding of the relation of cognition and emotion in ethical decision-making, a relation that is usually understood to be oppositional but which in proper circumstances may be understood to be quite the opposite. Indeed, a distinctive feature of moral exemplarity may consist in the ability to properly integrate the ...