Experience with Adults Shapes Multisensory Representation of Social Familiarity in the Brain of a Songbird

Social animals learn to perceive their social environment, and their social skills and preferences are thought to emerge from greater exposure to and hence familiarity with some social signals rather than others. Familiarity appears to be tightly linked to multisensory integration. The ability to differentiate and categorize familiar and unfamiliar individuals and to build a multisensory representation of known individuals emerges from successive social interactions, in particular with adult, experienced models. In different species, adults have been shown to shape the social behavior of young by promoting selective attention to multisensory cues. The question of what representation of known conspecifics adult-deprived animals may build therefore arises. Here we show that starlings raised with no experience with adults fail to develop a multisensory representation of familiar and unfamiliar starlings. Electrophysiological recordings of neuronal activity throughout the primary auditory area of these birds, while they were exposed to audio-only or audiovisual familiar and unfamiliar cues, showed that visual stimuli did, as in wild-caught starlings, modulate auditory responses but that, unlike what was observed in wild-caught birds, this modulation was not influenced by familiarity. Thus, adult-deprived starlings seem to fail to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals. This suggests that adults may shape multisensory representation of known individuals in the brain, possibly by focusing the young’s attention on relevant, multisensory cues. Multisensory stimulation by experienced, adult models may thus be ubiquitously important for the development of social skills (and of the neural properties underlying such skills) in a variety of species

No need to Talk, I Know You: Familiarity Influences Early Multisensory Integration in a Songbird's Brain

It is well known that visual information can affect auditory perception, as in the famous “McGurk effect,” but little is known concerning the processes involved. To address this issue, we used the best-developed animal model to study language-related processes in the brain: songbirds. European starlings were exposed to audiovisual compared to auditory-only playback of conspecific songs, while electrophysiological recordings were made in their primary auditory area (Field L). The results show that the audiovisual condition modulated the auditory responses. Enhancement and suppression were both observed, depending on the stimulus familiarity. Seeing a familiar bird led to suppressed auditory responses while seeing an unfamiliar bird led to response enhancement, suggesting that unisensory perception may be enough if the stimulus is familiar while redundancy may be required for unfamiliar items. This is to our knowledge the first evidence that multisensory integration may occur in a low-level, putatively unisensory area of a non-mammalian vertebrate brain, and also that familiarity of the stimuli may influence modulation of auditory responses by vision

Migraciones internas: ¿investigación para qué?

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Migracoes internas no Brasil: reflexoes sobre a correpondencia entre problema, pesquisa e politica

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From the Editors: Information, Attention, and Decision Making

More than five decades after the seminal works on how individuals process information and make decisions within organizations were published (Cyert & March, 1963; Simon, 1957), the thesis that individuals, groups, and organizations are bounded in their rationality and ability to attend to information continues to remain salient. Individuals and organizations display cognitive and motivational biases, both in their attention to information and in their decisions based on that information (De Dreu, Nijstad, & van Knippenberg, 2008; Ocasio, 2011; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). The nature and volume of information, and managers\u27 behaviors in seeking and using information, have undergone massive transformation over these past 50 years, which have seen the emergence of electronics, computers, and the Internet. Advances in information technology, mobile communications, and big data collection and storage mean that more people and firms have access to more information than ever before (George, Haas, & Pentland, 2014; Hilbert & Lopez, 2011). Yet, our frameworks of attention and decision making have not seen corresponding radical shifts. Perhaps, the underlying processes of decision making remain the same despite the transformative change in context. Alternatively, it is plausible that our theoretical advances have not matched the speed of change in information contexts confronted by businesses and policymakers alike. The growing ubiquity of information provides unprecedented opportunities—for learning, creativity , and innovation, as well as for performance. Understanding how to leverage these possibilities becomes an important challenge for management research and practice. However, the abundance of information also implies increasing competition for the attention of individuals, groups, and organizations ; increasing potential for information overload to fuel biases in decision making; increasing costs of collecting, storing, and sharing information ; and an increasing risk that all this information becomes a distraction from more relevant information or indeed from the job itself. Thus, a key challenge in the information age is to manage this wealth of available information and channel it to productive ends. In this thematic issue, we explore how management in the information age potentially differs and challenges our existing theoretical frameworks and assumptions. We assembled articles that address the rapidly evolving opportunities and challenges of managing in this new information-rich context. These articles are motivated by emergent themes and trends that set the stage for current and future scholarly research on information, attention, and decision making. We follow a brief analysis of these articles with potential directions for future research and highlight broader pastures where systematic research could further improve our understanding of how we live and work in the information age

The Role of Diabetes Co-Morbidity for Tuberculosis Treatment Outcomes: A Prospective Cohort Study from Mwanza, Tanzania.

Due to the association between diabetes and pulmonary tuberculosis (TB), diabetes may threaten the control of TB. In a prospective cohort study nested in a nutrition trial, we investigated the role of diabetes on changes in anthropometry, grip strength, and clinical parameters over a five months follow-up period. Among pulmonary TB patients with known diabetes status, we assessed anthropometry and clinical parameters (e.g. haemoglobin) at baseline and after two and five months of TB treatment. A linear mixed-effects model (repeated measurements) was used to investigate the role of diabetes during recovery. Of 1205 TB patients, the mean (standard deviation) age was 36.6 (13.0) years, 40.9% were females, 48.9% were HIV co-infected, and 16.3% had diabetes. TB patients with diabetes co-morbidity experienced a lower weight gain at two (1.3 kg, CI95% 0.5; 2.0, p = 0.001) and five months (1.0 kg, CI95% 0.3; 1.7, p = 0.007). Similarly, the increase in the level of haemoglobin was lower among TB patients with diabetes co-morbidity after two (Δ 0.6 g/dL, CI95% 0.3; 0.9 p < 0.001) and five months (Δ 0.5 g/dL, CI95% 0.2; 0.9 p = 0.004) of TB treatment, respectively. TB patients initiating TB treatment with diabetes co-morbidity experience delayed recovery of body mass and haemoglobin, which are important for the functional recovery from disease

Aspectos sociales de la migración internacional: consideraciones preliminares

Incluye BibliografíaEl estudio de la migración internacional ha resurgido en la última década por la importancia que ésta adquiere en un mundo de economía globalizada, en el cual el desplazamiento de los factores de producción se intensifica rápidamente, involucrando también al traslado de personas. Tales movimientos poblacionales tienen enormes repercusiones sociales y económicas, obligando las instancias públicas a tomar decisiones nuevas. En este trabajo se hace un balance de algunos temas relacionados con los impactos sociales de la migración internacional, entre los que se cuentan: las migraciones internacionales y la globalización; la importancia relativa de los factores demográficos como causas de la dinámica migratoria; las cadenas migratorias, las remesas y el desarrollo de comunidades de origen; la selectividad migratoria, la xenofobia y la discriminación, y la relación entre salud reproductiva, equidad de género y migración internacional