Recent research indicates that 6- to 9-month-olds understand a number of object words, but the nature of this understanding is unclear. This work examined whether infants restrict these terms to ...individual objects (like proper names) or extend them across multiple objects from a category (like common nouns). Experiment 1 reports evidence that 6-month-olds comprehend the name for their mother (e.g., “Mommy”) as restricted to the individual person. Experiment 2 offers support for the claim that 6- and 9-month-olds understand both a label that is restricted to an individual person (e.g., “Mommy”) and a label that extends to multiple members of an object category (i.e., “hand” or “ball”). Experiment 3 provides evidence that 12- to 15-month-olds comprehend both a word that is restricted to an individual (e.g., “Fido”) and a word that extends to multiple category members (e.g., “dog”) for the same object (i.e., a pet dog). The findings indicate that infants understand both individual- and categorical-scope words early in development, suggesting that neither lexical type represents a privileged starting point in word learning. We propose that cross-situational learning abilities, along with intuitive biases to conceptualize objects from particular semantic classes as either individuals or members of categories, play a role in infants' learning of words of the two lexical types.
Previous work indicates mutual exclusivity in word learning in monolingual, but not bilingual toddlers. We asked whether this difference indicates distinct conceptual biases, or instead reflects ...best‐guess heuristic use in the absence of context. We altered word‐learning contexts by manipulating whether a familiar‐ or unfamiliar‐race speaker introduced a novel word for an object with a known category label painted in a new color. Both monolingual and bilingual infants showed mutual exclusivity for a familiar‐race speaker, and relaxed mutual exclusivity and treated the novel word as a category label for an unfamiliar‐race speaker. Thus, monolingual and bilingual infants have access to similar word‐learning heuristics, and both use nonlinguistic social context to guide their use of the most appropriate heuristic.
•Five experiments investigate how things are represented as instances of object kinds (e.g. as a dog).•Transformation into potentially existing instance rejected more when within-kind than ...across-kind.•Transformation into actually existing instance rejected equally when within-kind and across-kind.•Instance-of-object-kind representations embody uniqueness-in-kind and mode-of- existence constraints.
We naturally think and talk about the objects we encounter as instances of one or another kind of object (e.g. as a dog). This paper makes a proposal concerning the instance-of-object-kind representations that allow us to think of things as instances of object kinds and investigates two predictions of the proposed representations. Instance-of-object-kind representations represent an object as one of indefinitely many instances of a given object kind. In so doing, they implicate a uniqueness-in-kind constraint which represents an object as unique within a kind, by distinguishing the instance-of-object-kind representation of an object from instance-of-object-kind representations of other actually as well as potentially existing instances of that object kind. The uniqueness-in-kind constraint predicts that a given instance of an object kind cannot be transformed into a different potentially existing instance of the same kind, but allows the object to be transformed into a potentially existing instance of a different object kind. Instance-of-object-kind representations also implicate a mode-of-existence constraint whereby actually existing instances of an object kind are represented as being distinct from all actually existing instances of that kind and other object kinds. This constraint predicts that participants should reject the possibility of transforming an actually existing instance of an object kind into an actually existing instance of the same or different object kind. Five experiments provide evidence for these constraints. In so doing, the experiments provide evidence for the formal characteristics of the proposed instance-of-object-kind representations that guide our thinking about things as instances of object kinds.
Stereotype threat has been shown to have deleterious impacts on the short- and long-term academic performance and psychological well-being of racial and ethnic minority students. Psychological ...variables related to this identity threat represent significant sources of achievement and attainment gaps relative to nonstereotyped Asian and white students who do not tend to be subject to performance declines related to such threats. In the current study, we investigate long-term effects of a brief self-affirmation intervention implemented at-scale to mitigate stereotype threat for seventh-grade African American and Latino students. Relative to their control-group counterparts, our findings indicate that a self-affirming intervention to buffer racial and ethnic minority students from identity threats reduced the growing achievement gap by 50% per year between seventh and 12th grade (N = 802). As a result, the achievement gap between white/Asian and African American/Latino students decreased by 42% at the end of 12th grade. Finally, the intervention increased on-time graduation rates for treated minority students by 10 percentage points (N = 952). Implications for theory, policy, and future research are discussed.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
Students of color routinely confront bias and negative stereotypes about their ability to succeed academically in secondary schools. Such "threats in the air" have been shown to cause a variety of negative responses among African American and Latino students, including decreased psychological well-being, anxiety, and decreased working memory, all of which can negatively impact the students' academic outcomes. In fact, these "threat responses" may account for as much as one third of the achievement gaps separating African American and Latino students from their white counterparts. With a brief, but precisely timed, series of four written exercises, seventh graders were offered the opportunity to reflect on other valued aspects of their personal identities beyond school. These so-called "self-affirmations" can help deflect some of the harm of bias and discrimination and help students of color to perform to their true potentials. Throughout an entire school district, we administered these exercises to seventh-grade students and tracked their academic progress through 12th grade. Our results suggest that the self-affirmations cut the growing achievement gaps in half and increased on-time graduation rates for students of color by 10 percentage points. Our article discusses how and under what circumstances such a brief intervention can have such strong and enduring effects.
Immune evasion is now recognized as a key feature of cancer progression. In animal models, the activity of cytotoxic lymphocytes is suppressed in the tumour microenvironment by the immunosuppressive ...cytokine, Transforming Growth Factor (TGF)-β. Release from TGF-β-mediated inhibition restores anti-tumour immunity, suggesting a therapeutic strategy for human cancer. We demonstrate that human natural killer (NK) cells are inhibited in a TGF-β dependent manner following chronic contact-dependent interactions with tumour cells in vitro. In vivo, NK cell inhibition was localised to the human tumour microenvironment and primary ovarian tumours conferred TGF-β dependent inhibition upon autologous NK cells ex vivo. TGF-β antagonized the interleukin (IL)-15 induced proliferation and gene expression associated with NK cell activation, inhibiting the expression of both NK cell activation receptor molecules and components of the cytotoxic apparatus. Interleukin-15 also promotes NK cell survival and IL-15 excluded the pro-apoptotic transcription factor FOXO3 from the nucleus. However, this IL-15 mediated pathway was unaffected by TGF-β treatment, allowing NK cell survival. This suggested that NK cells in the tumour microenvironment might have their activity restored by TGF-β blockade and both anti-TGF-β antibodies and a small molecule inhibitor of TGF-β signalling restored the effector function of NK cells inhibited by autologous tumour cells. Thus, TGF-β blunts NK cell activation within the human tumour microenvironment but this evasion mechanism can be therapeutically targeted, boosting anti-tumour immunity.
This research addressed the question of whether children understand proper names differently from descriptions. We examined how children extend these two types of expressions from an initial object ...(a truck) owned by the experimenter to two identical objects created by transforming the initial object, both owned by the experimenter. Adults and 5/6-year-olds extended a name (“Tommy”) to only one post-transformation object, but extended a description (“my truck”) to both objects. Adults and 7-year-olds (but not 5/6-year-olds) also extended a description modeled as a name (“called My Truck”) to only one object. Like adults, children understand that proper names identify unique individuals, but that descriptions identify properties.
Mutual exclusivity is the assumption that each object has only one category label. Prior research suggests that bilingual infants, unlike monolingual infants, fail to adhere to this assumption to ...guide word learning. Yet previous work has not addressed whether bilingual infants systematically interpret a novel word for a familiar object (i.e. an object with a known category label) as a second category label. We addressed this question by exploring bilingual and monolingual infants’ use of mutual exclusivity in a task in which they heard a novel label for a familiar object with a salient color (e.g. an aqua‐colored dog). They were subsequently tested with two trials that probed whether they interpreted the word as a second category label for the object (e.g. another word meaning dog) or as a label for one of the object's salient properties, namely its color (e.g. a word meaning aqua). Bilingual infants failed to adhere to mutual exclusivity and interpreted the novel word systematically as a second object category label for the familiar object. In contrast, consistent with their use of mutual exclusivity, monolingual infants rejected the novel word as a second category label, and instead showed some evidence of interpreting it as a property (color) term for the familiar object. The findings suggest that both bilingual and monolingual infants are systematic in their interpretation of a novel label for a familiar object, but that they show different interpretations of that label. We thus argue that theoretical accounts of early word learning must consider the crucial role of linguistic experience.
This research shows that linguistic experience shapes word‐learning strategies even at the onset of lexical development. While bilingual infants interpreted a novel label that is applied to a familiar object as a second category label (another label for the familiar category), monolingual infants interpreted the novel word as a property (color) term for the familiar object. These findings show that growing up bilingual can influence word learning strategies even in infancy, and more generally underscores the need for theories of word learning to take into consideration the role of early linguistic experience.
Hobbes' (1672/1913) famous puzzle of the Ship of Theseus – in which a wooden ship's parts are replaced plank by plank, and the old planks are subsequently reassembled to create a second ship – has ...been the source of debate about the criteria that underlie human judgments of individual artifact persistence. This puzzle has led some philosophers to the paradoxical conclusion that an artifact observed at one time is the same persisting individual as two artifacts seen at a later time. We argue that prior discussions of the puzzle have conflated property persistence (judged in conjunction with a description, like “Theseus' ship”) with individual persistence (judged in conjunction with a designator, like “X”). In three studies, we manipulated the linguistic expression (description, designator) used to label the original object in the puzzle. When participants solved the puzzle in conjunction with a description, they gave systematically high ratings to any object (either or both) that could be inferred to match the description. Yet when participants solved the same puzzle in conjunction with a designator, they gave significantly higher ratings to one post-change object (the object made of the reassembled old parts) than to the other post-change object (the object made of replacement parts). The results suggest that individual persistence judgments concerning the puzzle (i.e., those made in conjunction with a designating expression) are not paradoxical but rather are based on the continuity of the object's parts/material.
Background: Recent evidence suggests that increasing dietary intake of minerals reduces the risk of dementia. This study aimed to examine the relationship between potassium and diagnosis of mild ...cognitive impairment (MCI) in a sample of older Mexican-Americans from rural and urban populations. Methods: The sample was formed of a total of 139 participants with MCI and 371 normal controls from two independent cohorts: a rural cohort (Facing Rural Obstacles to Healthcare Now through Intervention, Education and Research Project FRONTIER) and an urban cohort (the Health and Aging Brain among Latino Elders HABLE study). Serum electrolytes examined were sodium and potassium. Age and education were entered in the model as covariates. Results: Across both cohorts, the Project FRONTIER (OR = 3.1; p = 0.01) and the HABLE Project (OR = 2.0; p = 0.04), the results indicated that serum potassium levels significantly increased the risk of diagnosis of MCI. Conclusion: Our finding suggested a link between serum potassium levels and a diagnosis of MCI in Mexican-Americans. The results of this study support a previous research which has suggested that the risk factors for MCI may vary by ethnicity.
To discover and validate serum glycoprotein biomarkers in ovarian cancer using proteomic-based approaches.
Serum samples from a "discovery set" of 20 patients with ovarian cancer or benign ovarian ...cysts or healthy volunteers were compared by fluorescence two-dimensional differential in-gel electrophoresis and parallel lectin-based two-dimensional profiling. Validation of a candidate biomarker was carried out with Western blotting and immunoassay (n = 424).
Twenty-six proteins that changed significantly were identified by mass spectrometric sequencing. One of these, confirmed by Western blotting, was afamin, a vitamin E binding protein, with two isoforms decreasing in patients with ovarian cancer. Validation using cross-sectional samples from 303 individuals (healthy controls and patients with benign, borderline, or malignant ovarian conditions and other cancers) assayed by ELISA showed significantly decreased total afamin concentrations in patients with ovarian cancer compared with healthy controls (P = 0.002) and patients with benign disease (P = 0.046). However, the receiver operating characteristic areas for total afamin for the comparison of ovarian cancer with healthy controls or benign controls were only 0.67 and 0.60, respectively, with comparable figures for CA-125 being 0.92 and 0.88 although corresponding figures for a subgroup of samples analyzed by isoelectric focusing for afamin isoform 2 were 0.85 and 0.79. Analysis of a further 121 samples collected prospectively from 9 patients pretreatment through to relapse indicated complementarity of afamin with CA-125, including two cases in whom CA-125 was noninformative.
Afamin shows potential complementarity with CA-125 in longitudinal monitoring of patients with ovarian cancer, justifying prospective larger-scale investigation. Changes in specific isoforms may provide further information.
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