Beyond Training Prosecutors about their Disclosure Obligations: Can Prosecutors\u27 Offices Learn from their Lawyers\u27 Mistakes Symposium: New Perspectives on Brady and Other Disclosure Obligations: What Really Works

Prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers, judges, and legal academics from around the country recently met at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York to discuss prosecutors\u27 compliance with their disclosure obligations. The overarching question was how prosecutors\u27 offices could do a better job. To assist representatives of the legal profession in approaching this question from new directions, the Symposium organizers invited speakers from outside the legal profession to talk about the causes of error and methods used to reduce error in other contexts. One of the themes was that, outside the practice of law, individuals and institutions learn from their mistakes. This Article considers whether prosecutors\u27 offices can identify and learn from their lawyers\u27 disclosure mistakes

An Enactive-Ecological Approach to Information and Uncertainty

Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve her intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view and by showing how direct learning, seen as instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity

Communities of Practice in the Public-Private-Partnership Sector for Neglected Diseases Drug Development: the Importance of Mindset Mapping

This research article explores the mindsets of Public-Private Partnerships and Clinical Trials Organizations (CTOs) and the potential conflicts when working on drug discovery and development in the Third World global infectious diseases sector. A Communities-of-Practice (CoP) approach has been adopted to more fully explore the underlying values, attitudes and practices of these two future partners. This exploratory study suggests that future collaboration will be dependent on the two communities understanding and interpretation of each others‟ sustainability drug development drivers. The authors present secondary research findings that suggest the positive contribution that cognitive mapping of a community‟s sense-making can have in understanding the community‟s likely engagement in any future joint enterprise. Proposed future research will explore the underlying sustainability drivers that may both push and pull CTOs to engage in future global infectious diseases discovery and development projects. The article concludes by discussing the implications for future sustainable drug development projects involving PPPs and potential new strategic partners

Can you see what i am talking about? Human speech triggers referential expectation in four-month-old infants

Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has been widely reported in the past. However, in order to successfully acquire language, one should also understand that speech is a referential, and that words can stand for other entities in the world. While there has been some evidence showing that young infants can make inferences about the communicative intentions of a speaker, whether they would also appreciate the direct relationship between a specific word and its referent, is still unknown. In the present study we tested four-month-old infants to see whether they would expect to find a referent when they hear human speech. Our results showed that compared to other auditory stimuli or to silence, when infants were listening to speech they were more prepared to find some visual referents of the words, as signalled by their faster orienting towards the visual objects. Hence, our study is the first to report evidence that infants at a very young age already understand the referential relationship between auditory words and physical objects, thus show a precursor in appreciating the symbolic nature of language, even if they do not understand yet the meanings of words

Approaches to learning information literacy: A phenomenographic study

This paper reports on an empirical study that explores the ways students approach learning to find and use information. Based on interviews with 15 education students in an Australian university, this study uses phenomenography as its methodological and theoretical basis. The study reveals that students use three main strategies for learning information literacy: 1) learning by doing; 2) learning by trial and error; and 3) learning by interacting with other people. Understanding the different ways that students approach learning information literacy will assist librarians and faculty to design and provide more effective information literacy education

Multisensory integration in dynamical behaviors: maximum likelihood estimation across bimanual skill learning

Optimal integration of different sensory modalities weights each modality as a function of its degree of certainty (maximum likelihood). Humans rely on near-optimal integration in decision-making tasks (involving e.g., auditory, visual, and/or tactile afferents), and some support for these processes has also been provided for discrete sensorimotor tasks. Here, we tested optimal integration during the continuous execution of a motor task, using a cyclical bimanual coordination pattern in which feedback was provided by means of proprioception and augmented visual feedback (AVF, the position of both wrists being displayed as the orthogonal coordinates of a single cursor). Assuming maximum likelihood integration, the following predictions were addressed: (1) the coordination variability with both AVF and proprioception available is smaller than with only one of the two modalities, and should reach an optimal level; (2) if the AVF is artificially corrupted by noise, variability should increase but saturate toward the level without AVF; (3) if the AVF is imperceptibly phase shifted, the stabilized pattern should be partly adapted to compensate for this phase shift, whereby the amount of compensation reflects the weight assigned to AVF in the computation of the integrated signal. Whereas performance variability gradually decreased over 5 d of practice, we showed that these model-based predictions were already observed on the first day. This suggests not only that the performer integrated proprioceptive feedback and AVF online during task execution by tending to optimize the signal statistics, but also that this occurred before reaching an asymptotic performance level

The joint role of trained, untrained, and observed actions at the origins of goal recognition

Recent findings across a variety of domains reveal the benefits of self-produced experience on object exploration, object knowledge, attention, and action perception. The influence of active experience may be particularly important in infancy, when motor development is undergoing great changes. Despite the importance of self-produced experience, we know that infants and young children are eventually able to gain knowledge through purely observational experience. In the current work, three-month-old infants were given experience with object-directed actions in one of three forms and their recognition of the goal of grasping actions was then assessed in a habituation paradigm. All infants were given the chance to manually interact with the toys without assistance (a difficult task for most three-month-olds). Two of the three groups were then given additional experience with object-directed actions, either through active training (in which Velcro mittens helped infants act more efficiently) or observational training. Findings support the conclusion that self-produced experience is uniquely informative for action perception and suggest that individual differences in spontaneous motor activity may interact with observational experience to inform action perception early in life.PostprintPeer reviewe