Attachment--and loss.

The chapter begins with a distinction made between the interactions children have with peers, the relationships they form with peers, and the groups and networks within which peer interactions and relationships occur. From this conceptual overview, a review of relevant theories is presented. Thereafter, a developmental perspective of peer interactions, relationships, and groups is presented covering the periods of infancy, toddlerhood, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. Subsequently, methods and measures pertaining to the study of children's peer experiences are described. Next, we examine factors that may account for peer acceptance and rejection as well as qualitatively rich and poor friendships. Among the factors discussed are included temperament (biological factors), sex of child, parenting, parent-child relationships, and culture. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the extent to which individual differences in peer acceptance, rejection and friendship (prevalence and quality) predict adaptive and maladaptive developmental outcomes and a suggested agenda for future research.


Keywords:

friendship;
peer interactions;
peer relationships;
peer rejection;
social acceptance;
social competence

Peer Interactions, Relationships, and Groups

Sensory information undergoes extensive associative elaboration and attentional modulation as it becomes incorporated into the texture of cognition. This process occurs along a core synaptic hierarchy which includes the primary sensory, upstream unimodal, downstream unimodal, heteromodal, paralimbic and limbic zones of the cerebral cortex. Connections from one zone to another are reciprocal and allow higher synaptic levels to exert a feedback (top-down) influence upon earlier levels of processing. Each cortical area provides a nexus for the convergence of afferents and divergence of efferents. The resultant synaptic organization supports parallel as well as serial processing, and allows each sensory event to initiate multiple cognitive and behavioural outcomes. Upstream sectors of unimodal association areas encode basic features of sensation such as colour, motion, form and pitch. More complex contents of sensory experience such as objects, faces, word-forms, spatial locations and sound sequences become encoded within downstream sectors of unimodal areas by groups of coarsely tuned neurons. The highest synaptic levels of sensory-fugal processing are occupied by heteromodal, paralimbic and limbic cortices, collectively known as transmodal areas. The unique role of these areas is to bind multiple unimodal and other transmodal areas into distributed but integrated multimodal representations. Transmodal areas in the midtemporal cortex, Wernicke's area, the hippocampal-entorhinal complex and the posterior parietal cortex provide critical gateways for transforming perception into recognition, word-forms into meaning, scenes and events into experiences, and spatial locations into targets for exploration. All cognitive processes arise from analogous associative transformations of similar sets of sensory inputs. The differences in the resultant cognitive operation are determined by the anatomical and physiological properties of the transmodal node that acts as the critical gateway for the dominant transformation. Interconnected sets of transmodal nodes provide anatomical and computational epicentres for large-scale neurocognitive networks. In keeping with the principles of selectively distributed processing, each epicentre of a large-scale network displays a relative specialization for a specific behavioural component of its principal neurospychological domain. The destruction of transmodal epicentres causes global impairments such as multimodal anomia, neglect and amnesia, whereas their selective disconnection from relevant unimodal areas elicits modality-specific impairments such as prosopagnosia, pure word blindness and category-specific anomias. The human brain contains at least five anatomically distinct networks. The network for spatial awareness is based on transmodal epicentres in the posterior parietal cortex and the frontal eye fields; the language network on epicentres in Wernicke's and Broca's areas; the explicit memory/emotion network on epicentres in the hippocampal-entorhinal complex and the amygdala; the face-object recognition network on epicentres in the midtemporal and temporopolar cortices; and the working memory-executive function network on epicentres in the lateral prefrontal cortex and perhaps the posterior parietal cortex. Individual sensory modalities give rise to streams of processing directed to transmodal nodes belonging to each of these networks. The fidelity of sensory channels is actively protected through approximately four synaptic levels of sensory-fugal processing. The modality-specific cortices at these four synaptic levels encode the most veridical representations of experience. Attentional, motivational and emotional modulations, including those related to working memory, novelty-seeking and mental imagery, become increasingly more pronounced within downstream components of unimodal areas, where they help to create a highly edited subjective version of the world. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)

http://zielinskifam.com/lit/gumc_nsci_papers/Mesulam_98_Brain_cog_review.pdf

From sensation to cognition.

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of a single genotype to produce more than one alternative form of morphology, physiological state, and/or behavior in response to environmental conditions. "Plasticity" and "development" are related terms that are becoming increasingly common in evolutionary biology and ecology. Both phenomena have passed through a period of neglect. In the 1960s Wigglesworth (228, p. 107) described some geneticists as being "apologetic" about environmentally cued polymorphisms, which they considered examples of unfortunate defects in the delicate genetic apparatus: "As R. A. Fisher once said to me, it is not surprising that such elaborate machinery should sometimes go wrong." And Bradshaw (19, p. 148) noted that botanists were carefully avoiding any mention of plasticity; environmental effects in experiments were considered "only an embarrassment." Until recently, genetic considerations have predominated in discussions of evolution and selection. Compared to the enormous progress made in genetics, there has been relatively little systematic effort to analyze environmental effects on the phenotype, and their evolutionary consequences. The plastic phenotype, stigmatized by poorly understood environmental influences and the ghost of Lamarck, has sometimes been lost from view as the focus of selection (e.g. 46; but see 48, 49). Much recent progress has been made toward integrating developmental and evolutionary biology, especially in vertebrate morphology (2, 12, 16, 216), developmental genetics (16, 163, 164), and molecular biology (103; also see 10, 111). "Developmental constraints" is a term symptomatic of this progress, though an unfortunate one because it seems to imply that the main effect of

Phenotypic Plasticity and the Origins of Diversity

Computers and Thought are the two categories that together define Artificial Intelligence as a discipline. It is generally accepted that work in Artificial Intelligence over the last thirty years has had a strong influence on aspects of computer architectures. In this paper we also make the converse claim; that the state of computer architecture has been a strong influence on our models of thought. The Von Neumann model of computation has lead Artificial Intelligence in particular directions. Intelligence in biological systems is completely different. Recent work in behavior-based Artificial Intelligence has produced new models of intelligence that are much closer in spirit to biological systems. The non-Von Neumann computational models they use share many characteristics with biological computation.

Intelligence without reason.

The Study of Instinct

Prenatal development of domestic and laboratory mammals: growth curves, external features and selected references.

The Comparative Ethology and Evolution of the Sand Wasps

A synopsis of the American Bethylidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata)

Some of the more conspicuous features of wasp behavior were reported more than two centuries ago, but it was not until the publication of the first volume of Fabre's Souvenirs Entomotogiques in 1879 (66) that the attractive­ ness of this field of investigation became widely apparent. The classic work of Fabre and those of Ferton (68), Adlerz (1), G. W. & E. G. Peckham (159), and P. & N. Rau (173) are widely known and have provided a broad founda­ tion for the natural history of wasps. More recently, the influence of the "European school" of ethologists, exemplified particularly by Tinbergen and Baerends, has been strongly felt. In a sense, the modern era of wasp ethology may be said to have begun with Baerends' extended study of Ammophila pubescens Curtis in 1941 (5) and with Iwata's "Comparative Studies on the Habits of Solitary Wasps" in 1942 (88), for both of these papers have had an important impact on research in this field in the past 25 years. These two papers are accepted as points of departure for the present review; these and other papers cited below contain bibliographies which collectively cover much of the very extensive literature in this field. I have omitted mention of many strictly descriptive studies, not because these are unimportant as contributing to the comparative ethology of wasps, but simply because a very large volume would be needed to survey this field fully. Attention will here be directed to behavior patterns common to all solitary wasps (more especially to fossorial species) and to some of the important questions being asked about them by contemporary workers. I have omitted consideration of wasps parasitic upon other wasps, including both parasitoids (such as M utillidae) and cleptoparasites (c1epto­ bionts, arbeitsparasiten) [such as Evagetes and Ceropales in the Pompilidae, Nysson and Stizoides in the Sphecidae (30, 37, 63, 73, 156, 220)]. Solitary wasps are defined as species in which there is no cooperation involving divis­ ion of labor between mothers and daughters or between females of the same gener ation. All social wasps belong to a portion of the superfamily Vespoidea, to the family Vespidae as defined by Richards (177); he regards the social wasps as probably monophyletic, although this opinion has not been univer­ sally accepted in the past. The nonparasitic solitary wasps considered here belong to seven families commonly placed in five superfamilies, as follows: Bethyloidea: Bethylidae; Scolioidea: Tiphiidae, Scoliidae; Vespoidea:

Howard E. Evans

Papers

The Study of Instinct

Prenatal development of domestic and laboratory mammals: growth curves, external features and selected references.

The Comparative Ethology and Evolution of the Sand Wasps

A synopsis of the American Bethylidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata)

The Behavior Patterns of Solitary Wasps