Metaglossia: The Translation World

The ability to communicate in multiple languages proves beneficial in more ways than communication. Students able to speak multiple languages continue to reap the many benefits.

Before I forget. Once again Mike Rose opens my eyes and clears my mind of the nonsense that accumulates when I’m not looking! “Giving Cognition a Bad Name”, Education Week, Januar...

Does translating have a therapeutic value? I think so. It has been known for a long time that certain types of work have the power to heal wounded soul, or at least make people feel fulfilled and r...

enter for Cognition Communication and Culture Opening Set for November 13
Rensselaer will launch the Center for Cognition, Communication, and Culture (CCC) on Tuesday, November 13, with a program of multimedia presentations on the initial core research areas -- cross-modal displays, mixed reality, and synthetic characters -- and an open house.. Jonas Braasch, associate professor of architecture and chair of the CCC Planning Group, has been named center director.

The CCC is Rensselaer's 10th Institute-wide research center and will focus on the intersections and interdependency of cognition, communication, and culture in the context of contemporary research, technology, and society. Interdisciplinary research activities will draw on the arts, design, engineering, humanities, science, and social science.

"The Rensselaer Plan is bringing a continued expansion of interdisciplinary research, and the launch of the Rensselaer Center for Cognition, Communication, and Culture is an important milestone in support of that priority," said President Shirley Ann Jackson. "This new center represents a new frontier of both research and pedagogy, and their intersection. The center will bring together researchers from such seemingly diverse arenas as the arts, computer science, cognitive science, and game design to forge new tools at the intersections of the cognitive, cyber, and physical worlds. By making it possible for us to interact with and manipulate vast quantities of data on a human scale, their work will help us to meet our social and technological challenges."

The initial core research areas are: Cross-modal displays, which seek to employ all human sense in understanding and exploring data; mixed reality, in which data overlaid on the real world enriches learning and research environments; and synthetic characters -- computer programs intended to simulate an independent individual.

"Through the CCC we hope to tackle some of the emerging challenges and opportunities that life in our growing parallel digital universe has brought up," said Braasch. "Initially, the center will focus on virtual reality-based narrative and game playing to develop better ways to learn languages in a more natural and entertaining way, work on the design of next-generation synthetic intelligent characters that can interact with us and enrich our social life, and on cross-modal scientific displays that take into account how humans integrate all their senses to explore and understand big data sets produced by the supercomputers like the CCNI, our supercomputing center."

To support this work, the CCC will host a new Emergent Reality Lab -- a large-scale CAVE Virtual Reality System. The system, now under construction, will be located in the Rensselaer Technology Park and support immersive video and audio projection.

The launch will begin at 11 a.m. in the Theater of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. Speakers will introduce specific research projects. The presentations will include:

BERWYN, PA. — QR Pharma, Inc. (QR), a clinical stage specialty pharmaceutical company committed to developing therapeutics with novel approaches for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD) and other neurodegenerative disorders, announced today that Dr. Maria Maccecchini, CEO, will be presenting new data on its lead compound "Posiphen® Recovers Memory, Learning and Brain Function in Alzheimer Transgenic Mice" at the 12th Annual Biotech Symposium, taking place October 22, 2012 in Philadelphia, PA. Alzheimer’s disease is a debilitating disease characterized pathologically by plaques and tangles in the brain. These deposits contain the toxic proteins Ab42 and phospho-Tau. Posiphen inhibits the synthesis of these two toxic proteins and reverses cognitive decline and synaptic dysfunction, making it a promising drug to treat neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Posiphen was tested in a model of cognitive impairment in transgenic Alzheimer mice to determine if the inhibition of these two toxic proteins reverted the cognitive decline and restored normal learning and memory function. Posiphen was administered orally once daily at 10 or 25 mg/kg to APPswe/PS1 transgenic mice for 10 weeks. After chronic treatment, Posiphen totally restored cognitive function as measured in two paradigms of memory and learning and totally restored long-term potentiation as measured by electrophysiology. The levels of APP/Ab42 and Tau/phospho-Tau also returned to normal, with no plaque detected in the treated mice.

Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/10/22/4354714/posiphen-restores-brain-function.html#storylink=cpy

We've all decided to "sleep on it" when confronted with a difficult choice to make, usually hoping that a good night's sleep and fresh perspective in the morning will make the decision a little easier. Well, one study from Lancaster University and published in the journal Memory and Cognition shows that sleeping on it really does help us tackle tough problems.
It may seem like common sense, but if you're struggling with a major decision or life change to ponder, trying to power through it and make it on the fly may not serve you as well as getting a good night's sleep and approaching the problem freshly the next day after a little rest. Here's what the researchers found:

We presented participants with a set of remote-associate tasks that varied in difficulty as a function of the strength of the stimuli–answer associations. After a period of sleep, wake, or no delay, participants reattempted previously unsolved problems. The sleep group solved a greater number of difficult problems than did the other groups, but no difference was found for easy problems. We conclude that sleep facilitates problem solving, most likely via spreading activation, but this has its primary effect for harder problems.

The Gist

While the assumption that human beings can control and intentionally forget unwanted memories had been controversial, recent studies have shown that it is indeed possible to control our memory. Several prior studies have shown that people can learn to voluntarily suppress memories, or block them from awareness. Scientists have been able to even capture the exact moment when such forgetfulness takes place.

Nonetheless, the underlying mechanisms of such suppression are still not fully researched and understood. A recent study done at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences at Cambridge, UK, sheds light on how the brain forgets what it doesn’t want to remember.

The Expert Take

The study, conducted by Roland Benoit of the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge, UK, concluded that the human brain uses two distinct mechanisms to forget unwanted memories. One way of forgetting lies in the brain’s ability to suppress events or circumstances entirely. The other method essentially substitutes one memory with another.

“There seem to be at least two routes that can lead to voluntary forgetting: a direct suppression mechanism that systemically disrupts retrieval processes and a thought substitution mechanism that impairs retention,” the study says. “Both mechanisms impair long-term retention by limiting momentary awareness of the memories, yet they operate in opposite ways.”

The study found that direct suppression “disengages episodic retrieval” of the memory, while thought substitution “engages retrieval processes” to essentially overwrite the memory with a different one. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the study determined that the two mechanisms activated different neural circuits and originated in different parts of the brain. “These mechanisms are mediated by distinct neural networks that achieve their functions in very different ways,” the authors note.

Memory suppression was associated with the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is located around the right temple. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is assumed to be important in working memory and executive function, including the regulation of thinking and action as well as recalling past events. Memory substitution activity was traced to the caudal prefrontal cortex and the midventrolateral prefrontal cortex—two regions responsible for retrieving memories into awareness in the presence of distracting memories.

"This study is the first demonstration of two distinct mechanisms that cause such forgetting: one by shutting down the remembering system, and the other by facilitating the remembering system to occupy awareness with a substitute memory," said Benoit.

Heart Failure May Trigger Forgetfulness
By JANE COLLINGWOOD

Heart failure has been linked to detrimental changes in the brain, says new research published recently in the European Heart Journal. The condition may occur due to ischemic heart disease or high blood pressure, and affects about three percent of all adults.

As heart failure has been linked to depression and cognitive impairment, Professor Osvaldo Almeida of the University of Western Australia, and colleagues investigated whether this is specifically due to the heart failure itself, or one of its causal factors.

They analysed data on 35 heart failure patients, 56 ischemic heart disease patients without heart failure, and 64 healthy people with neither condition. All were aged 45 years or above and had no obvious cognitive impairment. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the participants’ brains were assessed.

This is the first study of cognitive changes in heart failure to include patients with ischemic heart disease.

Participants with heart failure had a lower volume of grey matter in many areas of the brain than the other two groups. These patients also had lower scores on short- and long-term memory, had longer reaction speeds, and took longer to complete a reasoning task.

Professor Almeida explains, “What we found in this study is that both ischemic heart disease and heart failure are associated with a loss of cells in certain brain regions that are important for the modulation of emotions and mental activity. Such a loss is more pronounced in people with heart failure. Health professionals and patients need to be aware that problems caused by heart disease are not limited to the heart.”

In their paper, the researchers conclude, “Adults with heart failure have worse immediate and long-term memory and psychomotor speed than controls without ischemic heart disease.”

This could make it more difficult for patients to comply with complicated treatment regimes, they warn, stating, “Our findings are consistent with the possibility that patients with heart failure may have trouble following complex management strategies, and, therefore, treatment messages should be simple and clear.”

A study presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY 2012™ annual meeting found children's negative behavioral change after surgery differs among Spanish- and English-speaking White and Hispanic families.

Previous studies show 80 percent of children exhibit some form of negative behavioral change (i.e. anxiety, separation anxiety, sleep disturbance, aggression toward authority, temper tantrums, apathy/withdrawal and eating problems) on the first day home after surgery, and for one-third of these children, change persists over the course of two weeks.

The severity and duration of negative behavioral change can vary according to individual characteristics such as temperament, age, postoperative pain and prior health care experience. The study aimed to determine whether ethnicity also plays a role in postoperative behavioral change among Hispanic and White children.

"It is known Hispanic children may under report pain and also are potentially at risk for suboptimal pain management," said study author Suzanne Strom, M.D., Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Care School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine. "Therefore, it is reasonable to assume the incidence of behavioral change after surgery may also vary according to ethnicity."

Source: University of California, Irvine

An Old-School Notion: Writing Required
By Dan Berrett
Too many students aren't learning enough.

That alarm was sounded by the book Academically Adrift two years ago and has been the theme of numerous articles and conferences since. It also underlies the frustrations of employers who find recent graduates ill-prepared for the workplace.

What if colleges, in their search to more clearly demonstrate how much students are learning, insisted on an old-fashioned requirement: writing?

Writing works exceedingly well as both a way to assess learning and a means of deepening that learning, according to experts who study its effects on students.

Even faculty members whose disciplines are not commonly associated with writing think so.

Just as particles gain mass as they move through the Higgs boson field, he says, "student learning gains heft as students interact through writing with the subjects they are studying."

"There are very few test methodologies that are as effective as having you sit down and write your thoughts and have someone read it carefully and come back with comments and say, 'You have to rewrite this,'" says Daniel D. Warner, a professor of mathematical sciences at Clemson University.

That's because writing is uniquely able to "make thinking visible," says Julie A. Reynolds, associate director of undergraduate studies at Duke University. It lays bare students' thinking, showing how well they grasp the subject matter in ways that a multiple-choice or short-answer test—or even a discussion section—simply can't.

"Anywhere we can make their thought process visible is where faculty can have the greatest impact in their teaching," Ms. Reynolds says.

That view is not fully embraced in other disciplines, says Christopher Thaiss, chair of the writing program at the University of California at Davis. Some faculty members may not see writing as their expertise, he says, and many are concerned that time spent on students' writing assignments will take away precious time needed for covering material.

That doesn't need to be the case. Short, frequent assignments to which faculty respond can have a profound effect, he says. "There are so many ways to do it, most of which don't take a lot of time."

Reading & Learning PATHWAYS is in the business of changing lives.

Non-readers become readers, struggling learners become eager learners and confidence abounds. "I read books now, last year I just looked at pictures" is a pretty typical sentiment from PATHWAYS graduates.

PATHWAYS is a learning centre

that provides struggling students with the tools they need to succeed. They deliver individualized programs designed to build memory, attention, processing and sequencing skills.

These skills, called cognitive skills, are essential for learning to be successful.

PATHWAYS does not teach children what to learn, they teach them how to learn. As such, PATHWAYS is a prerequisite to tutoring and other special education programs.

Research confirms that over 80 per cent of children who struggle at school do so because of weak cognitive skills.

PATHWAYS uses a one hour diagnostic assessment to determine if weak cognitive skills are the reason a child is struggling. After the assessment, receive an easy to understand comprehensive report that includes age comparisons.

The programs used by PATHWAYS are non-invasive, computer-based and interactive. They adjust with every response given and quickly and permanently build the skills essential for academic success.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Children+improve+their+cognitive+skills/7395839/story.html#ixzz29U3ZkRhw

Poorer Lung Health Leads to Age-Related Changes in Brain Function

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Keeping the lungs healthy could be an important way to retain thinking functions that relate to problem-solving and processing speed in one’s later years, new research suggests.

While these two types of “fluid” cognitive functions were influenced by reduced pulmonary function, a drop in lung health did not appear to impair memory or lead to any significant loss of stored knowledge, the study showed.

Researchers used data from a Swedish study of aging that tracked participants’ health measures for almost two decades. An analysis of the data with statistical models designed to show the patterns of change over time determined that reduced pulmonary function can lead to cognitive losses, but problems with cognition do not affect lung health.

Charles Emery
“The logical conclusion from this is that anything you could do to maintain lung function should be of benefit to fluid cognitive performance as well,” said Charles Emery, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and lead author of the study. “Maintaining an exercise routine and stopping smoking would be two primary methods. Nutritional factors and minimizing environmental exposure to pollutants also come into play.”

Emery said the analysis also offers insights into the process of human aging. While one theory of aging holds that all functions that slow down do so at the same rate, this study suggests that some aspects of functional decline contribute to a change in the rate of other areas of decline.

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was the guest at the Kentucky Author Forum on Oct. 2, 2012, interviewed by NPR's Neal Conan. Pinker is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition and is the author of numerous books, including The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, and most recently, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker examines human violence through the centuries. We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In the book, Pinker argues that violence in the past was actually much worse than now. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals—all substantially down.

The latest developments in cardiology and cardiovascular research, including heartwire news and commentary by some of the world's top cardiologists. Sign up for free.

Helsinki, Finland - Hypertension during pregnancy can lead to lifelong cognitive deficits in offspring, a new study suggests [1].

Researchers report that older men whose mothers had hypertension during pregnancy had more cognitive deficits than those with mothers who were normotensive. The deficits, first identified when the study participants were 20 years old, were uncovered again when they were almost 70 years old.

The study demonstrates that an adverse prenatal environment can have long-term consequences, said study author Dr Katri Räikkönen (University of Helsinki, Finland). "It shows that these effects are still present and evident several decades later—in other words, that these prenatal effects persist to old age," Räikkönen said in an interview.

The results are one more reason for women of childbearing age to avoid becoming obese, as this is a key risk factor for hypertensive spectrum disorder during pregnancy, she said.

However, although the results were statistically significant, mothers and their offspring should take heart that no individual-level conclusions can be drawn from the findings, she said. "The differences we saw were not clinically significant, if we think that a clinically significant difference would be one standard deviation; these differences were less than one-third of a standard deviation."

The new study is published online October 3, 2012 in Neurology.

Helsinki Birth Cohort

Hypertensive disorders, including chronic hypertension, gestational hypertension, and preeclampsia, complicate about 10% of all pregnancies, the authors note.

For this analysis, the researchers used a subsample of 398 men in the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study who were born between 1934 and 1944 and underwent cognitive testing twice—first during compulsory military service at an average age of 20.1 years and then again at an average age of 68.5 years. The cognitive battery included verbal, arithmetic, and visuospatial reasoning subtests, each consisting of 40 timed multiple-choice questions.

From medical records on maternal blood pressure and urinary protein tests during pregnancy, the researchers identified two groups of mothers: normotensive (those with systolic pressure <140 mm Hg or diastolic pressure <90 mm Hg during pregnancy) and hypertensive disorder in pregnancy (those with systolic blood pressure >140 mm Hg or diastolic blood pressure >90 mm Hg with or without proteinuria).

Compared with men born to normotensive mothers, those whose mothers had a hypertensive spectrum disorder scored lower on arithmetic tests (mean score 27.97 vs 29.30 at 20.1 years; 25.14 vs 28.20 at 68.5 years) after adjustments for several factors, including age at first cognitive test and the time interval between the two tests.

As for total cognitive ability, the older men in the hypertensive group scored 4.36 points lower and had a greater decline in total cognitive ability since the first test (2.88).

led under Local News · Tagged with lord fairfax community college

On Friday, Oct. 19th, Lord Fairfax Community College will host its second Symposium on Thinking and Writing at the College Level.
This event focuses on exploration of the writing process and current research about transferring skills across writing courses and disciplines. Participants will be teachers from different disciplines throughout high schools, community colleges, and universities. The symposium will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the Corron Community Development Center on the Middletown Campus.
Keynote speaker for the event will be Rebecca Moore Howard, a graduate of West Virginia University, and past instructor at Colgate, Texas Christian, Cornell, and Binghamton Universities. She is now Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse. Her scholarly and pedagogical books and essays include Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators and Writing Matters: A Handbook for Writing and Research. She is a principal researcher in the Citation Project, a multi-site, data-based study of college students’ use of research sources.

How to Turn Your Phone Into a Mind-Reading Personal Assistant
Whitson Gordon
Smartphones, despite their name, are actually pretty dumb. They only do what you tell them to, and constantly inputting information can get tedious. However, with a few apps, you can not only make your phone smarter, but turn it into a mind-reading personal assistant that lets you know of important information as you need it: like traffic for your commute, a reminder to pick up milk as you pass the grocery store, and even automatic text messages to your friends when you're driving to meet them. Here's how to do it.
What You'll Get
The purpose of this setup is to make your phone give you information as you need it, rather than you having to constantly ask it about traffic conditions, your calendar events, and other important stuff. When you're done, your phone will be able to:

Give you a notification you when it's time to leave for your next appointment or event, based on traffic and your current location
Public transit info, including where the nearest station is, the optimal route to get to any location, and how long it will take you
Send an automatic text message to your friends or family when you're on your way to meet them, with estimates on when you'll arrive
Notify you when you arrive at a location with a to-do item attached to it, e.g., notifying you to get milk when you pass the grocery store

The growth pattern of long-range connections in the brain predicts how a child’s reading skills will develop, according to research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

Literacy requires the integration of activity in brain areas involved in vision, hearing and language. These areas are distributed throughout the brain, so efficient communication between them is essential for proficient reading.

Jason Yeatman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues studied how the development of reading ability relates to growth in the brain’s white-matter tracts, the bundles of nerve fibres that connect distant regions of the brain.

They tested how the reading skills of 55 children aged between 7 and 12 years old developed over a three-year period. There were big differences in reading ability between the children, and these differences persisted — the children who were weak readers relative to their peers at the beginning of the study were still weak three years later.

The researchers also scanned the brains of 39 of the children at least three times during the same period, to visualize the growth of two major white-matter tracts: the arcuate fasciculus, which conects the brain's language centres, and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, which links the language centres with the parts of the brain that process visual information.

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Dyslexia: Lost for words
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Differences in the growth of both tracts could predict the variations in reading ability. Strong readers started off with a weak signal in both tracts on the left side of the brain, which got stronger over the three years. Weaker readers exhibited the opposite pattern.

Study: Learning A Language Changes Brains

October 8, 2012 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.
LUND, Sweden (UPI) — Intensive learning of a new language can make certain areas of the brain increase in size, Swedish researchers say.
Scientists studied young recruits at the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy who learned a new language at a very fast pace, going from having no knowledge of a language such as Arabic, Russian or Dari to speaking it fluently in the space of 13 months.
Measured against a control group of university students who also studied intensively but in subjects other than languages, the researcher found specific parts of the brains of the language students grew.
The parts that increased in size were the hippocampus, a deep-lying brain structure involved in learning new material and spatial navigation, and three areas in the cerebral cortex.
“We were surprised that different parts of the brain developed to different degrees depending on how well the students performed and how much effort they had had to put in to keep up with the course,” said Johan Martensson, a researcher in psychology at Lund University.
Students with greater growth in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex related to language learning had better language skills than the other students, the researchers said.
Some previous research has suggested Alzheimer’s disease has a later onset in people who are bilingual or multilingual.
“Even if we cannot compare three months of intensive language study with a lifetime of being bilingual, there is a lot to suggest that learning languages is a good way to keep the brain in shape,” Martensson said.

I was recently re-reading some notes about the great German writer Goethe’s (1749-1832) masterpiece “Faust.” The old, well-known folk tale narrates of Dr. Faust having made a pact with the Devil in order to gain universal knowledge and magical powers. As a consequence, he lost his soul. Goethe’s character is totally different. His Faust represents the virtue of human aspiration and is therefore highly inspiring, in spite of his many downfalls. The story is simple, although it has numberless ramifications. Faust makes a bet with Mephistopheles (the Devil) stating that the latter will not be able to make any moment so pleasurable that Faust will wish for Time to stop. And, fortunately, he wins the bet.
Faust can be viewed as a symbol of all mankind because he embodies the best and the worst in man. He has all the vices and virtues conceivable, on a grand scale. He is constantly striving to reach beyond the limits of the physical world, constantly struggling to attain an always greater understanding and fulfillment. The most important thing here is that he never gives up. His life is a series of ups and downs, like a jagged line, it is formed by rises and falls, like every man’s, like mine and yours. But he persists.
Mephistopheles, on the other hand, represents the spirit of “denial,” the negative side of creation. He could be seen as the impulse of the intellect or even, on the opposite side, the sheer passion without the wise guidance from feelings, which craves the acquisition of a coveted goal at all costs, no matter what. This reminds me of the famous saying “The aim justifies the means” (from “The Prince,” by Italian Renaissance diplomat and philosopher Niccolo’ Machiavelli (1469-1527).
Faust makes many mistakes throughout his life but, actually, he never disobeys God’s commands. Therefore he — in the end — deserves God’s forgiveness. He is worth of trust, that is why God allows him to be prey of temptation. How much or — better — what part of Faust is within yourself?
When you feel disappointed or dissatisfied, you tend to see your life less than gratifying, less than successful. You surrender to upset or even depression, you complain and feel unfairly treated by Destiny. It should not be so. When you find yourself in such a situation, the best “strategy” would be to accept and try to understand it. All negative circumstances are brought about by wrong-thinking and wrong-doing on somebody’s part. It could be “others,” but it could also be “you.” As far as “your” life is concerned, it most probably is “you.”

[...] the CEOs identified creativity as the most important skill. While schools have always been good at teaching critical thinking — an important and aligned skill — creative thinking is most often absent from the curriculum.

Jonathan Yardley
Critic
“The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published” by David Skinner
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Published: October 6

The dictionary commonly known as “Webster’s Third” — its full title is “Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language” — was published in 1961 after years of assiduous preparation and immediately ran into a storm of controversy that its editors could not have anticipated. David Skinner, who edits Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, argues that the damage was largely self-inflicted.

Its publisher, the firm G. & C. Merriam, issued a cutsy-pie news release citing the various new words the editors had decided to include, among them “A-Bomb,” “beatnik” and “satellite”; the various contemporary celebrities (Betty Grable, Mickey Spillane, Dwight Eisenhower) whose utterances or writings had been quoted as usage examples; and “the new dictionary’s surprisingly tolerant, though oddly worded, entry for ‘ain’t,’ which said ‘ain’t’ was ‘used orally in most parts of the U.S. by cultivated speakers.’ ”

Cognition and behavior: Bilingualism aids people with autism
E-mail Print Share This Jessica Wright
2 October 2012

A gesture life: Bilingual children are better at nonverbal communication than are those who speak only one language.

Being fluent in both English and Spanish may boost the use of communicative gestures in children with autism, according to a study published 1 August in the Journal of Child Neurology1.

It’s well established that bilingualism has many cognitive benefits. Even among children with autism, two studies published last year showed that those who are bilingual score similarly on language and vocabulary tests to those who speak only one language.

Still, because language difficulties often accompany autism, some clinicians hold that bilingualism is not advisable for children with the disorder.

In the new study, researchers looked at the medical records of children under 3 years of age with autism who attended the Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center, which is affiliated with the Albert Einstein Medical Center in New York. The children were diagnosed based on criteria outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule and the Childhood Autism Rating Scale.

The 40 children who know both Spanish and English spoke and understood language as well as did the 40 children who only speak English, the study found.

Studies have shown that toddlers with autism are less likely than controls to use gestures when communicating. Researchers consider gestures such as pointing to be a component of joint attention, which is the ability to engage or follow others’ attention. Teaching joint attention skills to children with autism has been shown to improve their language ability later in life.

In the new study, about half of the bilingual children with autism communicated using gestures, compared with one-quarter of the monolingual children. The bilingual children were also more likely than the monolingual children to lead their caregiver to an object and to make vocalizations, such as cooing, the researchers found.

Innateness and Contemporary Theories of Cognition
First published Mon Oct 1, 2012
Nativism is experiencing a resurgence. Up until some sixty years ago, there were no active research programs that were looking for the innate factors in knowledge and cognition that had been hypothesized and argued for by Nativist thinkers since Plato. It was widely agreed that the centuries-old battles between Empiricists and Nativists were over, and that the Empiricists had decisively won. The Nativist situation was actually worse than that: innateness claims were seen as not only wrong, but as ultimately unscientific approaches to mind and perhaps incoherent as well. The prevailing research agenda for scientists and philosophers interested in how the mind works was to show how our knowledge and abilities could be fully accounted for on the basis of our sensory experiences and the general learning mechanisms that operate on them.

A number of developments led to a change in this situation, but most significant was Chomsky's revolutionary work in linguistics in the 1950's and 1960's. Today the cognitive sciences are teeming with multi-disciplinary approaches to mind that are very much open to the idea that the character of our mental lives owes a great deal more to our innate endowments than Empiricists have supposed. It is also teeming with work that is more in line with Empiricist commitments, so it is hard to determine whether, all things considered, the tide has turned in favor of Nativism. But there is no question that the Nativist approach is once again a live and very lively option.

This entry places this resurgence in its scientific and philosophical context, and will discuss a few important areas of research to give a taste of the kinds of experimental approaches, hypotheses, and theories that have been advanced. A word about the focus of this entry. Most philosophical discussions about innateness begin with careful analyses of the variety of meanings innateness claims can have, consider the sorts of entities that might be at issue in such claims (beliefs, ideas, concepts, knowledge, etc.), discuss the epistemological standing of these innate elements, and so on. These questions are no doubt interesting—and sometimes the answers are interesting too—and such work has its place. But the real action for philosophers is more in the details of the current empirical research, and less in the philosophical bookkeeping. Cognitive scientists are beginning to reveal some of the basic, or one might say ‘primal’, patterns of human cognition. They are using experimental evidence to paint a detailed picture of how we human beings understand the world—both the physical world around us, and ourselves and other selves that are parts of that world. Developmental scientists are trying to figure out to what extent and in what ways we are built by nature to arrive at these understandings. Those we identify as Nativists accord a significant role to our natures, and lean towards the view that we are not built to be initially neutral about the world we encounter, in the way that classical Empiricism would lead us to expect. This growing body of scientific thinking is of general interest, as evidenced by the attention of science magazines and newspapers like the NY Times. But the character of our primal understandings and their innate bases are intimately connected to the central concepts and questions that philosophers have always been most interested in. Getting clear on how we naturally think and how we come to think that way is, arguably, a critical element in our understanding of human beings.

Exercise 'improves memory and cognition after stroke'

1st October 2012

People who have had a stroke can improve their memory and cognition through exercise, it has been revealed.

Undertaking just six months of exercise is able to improve memory, language, thinking and judgement issues by almost 50 per cent, according to research presented at the Canadian Stroke Congress.

It was found that the proportion of stroke patients with mild cognitive impairment, at the least, dropped from 66 per cent to 37 per cent during a research study detailing the impact of exercise on the brain.

"Significant improvements" were found in overall brain function when the program ended, with the most improvement being seen in attention, concentration, planning and organisation.

Lead research Susan Marzolini, from the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, said: "People who have cognitive deficits after stroke have a threefold risk of mort