Criatividade, pesquisa e inovação. O caminho surpreendente da descoberta.

The semantic horizon of the term innovation is fairly broad, at least as broad as the mental processes that are at its origin and the changes it engenders. Through ever new combinations of ideas and events, innovation brings about changes and discontinuity in scienti c, cultural, and social paradigms. Above all, innovation is the ability of the mind to combine ludic and logic elements, extract from apparently banal data new and surprising elements, provide divergent and creative responses, and generate different hypotheses, scenarios, and solutions in almost casual fashion – even outside a structured logic

Seniors’ ability to decode differently aged facial emotional expressions

The present investigation aims at assessing elders' ability to decode facial emotional expressions conveyed by differently aged people in order to confirm (or disconfirm) the appropriateness of the 'own age bias' theory, as well as investigate effects of different ages and different emotional categories. The study, involves 44 healthy elders (23 females), aged 65+ (mean age=75.09; SD=±7.9) which were requested to label 76 pictures depicting elders, middle-aged and young women and men displaying the six facial emotional expressions of disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness and neutrality. Results show a complex pattern of influences that calls for more deep investigations on the features to be accounted by providing socially and emotionally believable interfaces of effective and efficient algorithms to detect and decode their users' emotional facial expressions

The Desiring Algorithm. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic

Each new era brings with it new technologies and new challenges to civilization. The impetuous technological development is changing the economy and work more and more every day; to the point of making the passage from agrarian society to industrial society seem like a trifle. Nevertheless, if there is widespread awareness of the general issues of society, there is definitely less on the way in which anthropomorphic robots (increasingly in an emotional and cognitive relationship with human beings) are radically modifying intimate and exclusive spheres such as sexuality and love. An epochal passage is being announced from an organic sexuality (driven by desire and pleasure) to an inorganic, artificial sexuality, suspended in an abstract excitement, always at hand and disengaged from categories such as beauty, forms and age. In this paper, we will discuss the plausibility of an emotional relationship between robots and human beings and its ethical implications. It is probable, in fact, that soon there will be self-aware robots, capable of experiencing feelings such as love, joy, suffering, pain and pleasure. If this scenario is realized, will we continue to think that they are only machines, or will we recognize the moral relevance that they do not have today

Modal Structure and Altered States of Consciousness

Although it is a familiar experience for everyone, in the vast majority of cases we discover the importance of consciousness only when in front of someone who no longer appears to possess it: someone ‘absent’, with their eyes fixed in the void, while the heart beats vigorously and their muscle tone is intact; or a patient with a psycho-organic syndrome or brain trauma, who is awake, even alert, but no longer in contact with the surrounding environment. Despite the fact that millions of people around the world enter and leave the state of consciousness every day, neurophysiological and clinical knowledge about consciousness is still far from forming a coherent scientific corpus. In fact, nowadays, there is no general shared definition of an altered state of consciousness. In this paper we propose a structured model of the phenomenon of consciousness, viewed as a multivariate combination of independent factors, which includes the variations and transitions of consciousness from a normal state of wakefulness to a psychopathological condition (with discrete deviations in subjective experience), and to severe clinical-neurological pictures

The Unaware Brain: The Role of the Interconnected Modal Matrices in the Centrencephalic Space of Functional Integration

For over a century, it has been accepted that there exists a remote psychic space that influences our way of thinking, perception, decision-making and so on. This space, defined by Freud as the ‘unconscious’, embodies the psychic element that we are unaware of. It is a space that is an extension and a wider representation of the complex and sophisticated metapsychological apparatus he conceived. With respect to the conscious sphere (whose related anatomical function concerns the encephalic trunk, diencephalon and associative cortical areas), this unconscious dimension relates to the limbic lobe and specific areas of the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes. This complex neurophysiological system connects and coordinates the sensory, emotional, cognitive and behavioural systems. Its sophisticated adaptive functions, implied and unaware, allow the prefrontal cortex to transform a huge amount of information into explicit behaviour, thus affecting our behaviour in terms of executive functions, decision-making, moral judgments and so on. In this paper, we advance the hypothesis that these subcortical components constitute interconnected modal matrices that intervene under certain circumstances to respond to environmental requirements. In this space of functional integration, they act as an intermediary between the frontal cortex, the limbic system and the basal ganglia and are a key player in the planning, selection and decision to carry out appropriate actions. Due to their generativity and intramodal and extramodal connections, it is plausible to assume that they also play a role in mediation between unconscious and conscious thought. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020

A Non-linear Predictive Model of Borderline Personality Disorder Based on Multilayer Perceptron

Borderline Personality Disorder is a serious mental disease, classified in Cluster B of DSM IV-TR personality disorders. People with this syndrome presents an anamnesis of traumatic experiences and shows dissociative symptoms. Since not all subjects who have been victims of trauma develop a Borderline Personality Disorder, the emergence of this serious disease seems to have the fragility of character as a predisposing condition. Infect, numerous studies show that subjects positive for diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder had scores extremely high or extremely low to some temperamental dimensions (harm Avoidance and reward dependence) and character dimensions (cooperativeness and self directedness). In a sample of 602 subjects, who have had consecutive access to an Outpatient Mental Health Service, it was evaluated the presence of Borderline Personality Disorder using the semi-structured interview for the DSM IV-TR personality disorders. In this population we assessed the presence of dissociative symptoms with the Dissociative Experiences Scale and the personality traits with the Temperament and Character Inventory developed by Cloninger. To assess the weight and the predictive value of these psychopathological dimensions in relation to the Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis, a neural network statistical model called “multilayer perceptron,” was implemented. This model was developed with a dichotomous dependent variable, consisting in the presence or absence of the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and with five covariates. The first one is the taxonomic subscale of dissociative experience scale, the others are temperamental and characterial traits: Novelty-Seeking, Harm-Avoidance, Self-Directedness and Cooperativeness. The statistical model, that results satisfactory, showed a significance capacity (89%) to predict the presence of borderline personality disorder. Furthermore, the dissociative symptoms seem to have a greater influence than the character traits in the borderline personality disorder e disease. In conclusion, the results seem to indicate that to borderline personality disorder development, contribute both psychic factors, such as temperament and character traits, and environmental factors, such as traumatic events capable of producing dissociative symptoms. These factors interact in a nonlinear way in producing maladaptive behaviors typical of this disorder

Decision-making styles in an evolutionary perspective

Naturalistic decision-making (NDM) investigates the cognitive strategies used by experts in making decisions in real-world contexts. Unlike studies conducted in the laboratory, the NDM paradigm is applied to real human interactions, often characterized by uncertainty, risk, complexity, time pressures and so on. In this approach, the role of experience is crucial in making possible a quick classification of decision-making situations and therefore in making an effective, rapid and prudent choice. Models of behaviour resulting from these studies represent an extraordinary resource for research and for the application of decision-making strategies in high-risk environments. They particularly underline not only that most of the critical decisions that we take are based on our intuition, but that the ability to recognize patterns and other signals that allow us to act effectively is a natural extension of experience. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020