The early development of the normative mind

Normativity is pervasive in everyday human social interactions and perhaps even constitutive of human forms of group and societal living. During the past decade, there has been increased interest in the ontogeny of normativity and the role that norms play in early social reasoning and behavior. Given the ubiquity of normativity, it is vital to investigate the development of children’s normative understanding and behavior in a variety of different contexts, ranging from prosocial behavior to rational action or from linguistic competencies to cultural norms and values. Hence, in this special issue on the early development of the normative mind, researchers from different theoretical traditions have employed a number of different methods (e.g., third-party norm enforcement, judgment and reasoning, social behavior) to address different, yet related, research questions about the ontogeny of normativity. Here, we introduce the reader to the current debate and point to important research questions for the field

Preschoolers Understand the Moral Dimension of Factual Claims

Research on children’s developing moral cognition has mostly focused on their evaluation of, and reasoning about, others’ intrinsically harmful (non-)verbal actions (e.g., hitting, lying). But assertions may have morally relevant (intended or unintended) consequences, too. For instance, if someone wrongly claims that “This water is clean!,” such an incorrect representation of reality may have harmful consequences to others. In two experiments, we investigated preschoolers’ evaluation of others’ morally relevant factual claims. In Experiment 1, children witnessed a puppet making incorrect assertions that would lead to harm or to no harm. In Experiment 2, incorrect assertions would always lead to harm, but the puppet either intended the harm to occur or not. Children evaluated the puppet’s factual claim more negatively when they anticipated harmful versus harmless consequences (Experiment 1) and when the puppet’s intention was bad versus good over and above harmful consequences (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that preschoolers’ normative understanding is not limited to evaluating others’ intrinsically harmful transgressions but also entails an appreciation of the morally relevant consequences of, and intentions underlying, others’ factual claims

Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds

Human social life depends heavily on social norms that prescribe and proscribe specific actions. Typically, young children learn social norms from adult instruction. In the work reported here, we showed that this is not the whole story: Three-year-old children are promiscuous normativists. In other words, they spontaneously inferred the presence of social norms even when an adult had done nothing to indicate such a norm in either language or behavior. And children of this age even went so far as to enforce these self-inferred norms when third parties broke them. These results suggest that children do not just passively acquire social norms from adult behavior and instruction;rather, they have a natural and proactive tendency to go from is to ought. That is, children go from observed actions to prescribed actions and do not perceive them simply as guidelines for their own behavior but rather as objective normative rules applying to everyone equally

Scalable Group Level Probabilistic Sparse Factor Analysis

Many data-driven approaches exist to extract neural representations of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, but most of them lack a proper probabilistic formulation. We propose a group level scalable probabilistic sparse factor analysis (psFA) allowing spatially sparse maps, component pruning using automatic relevance determination (ARD) and subject specific heteroscedastic spatial noise modeling. For task-based and resting state fMRI, we show that the sparsity constraint gives rise to components similar to those obtained by group independent component analysis. The noise modeling shows that noise is reduced in areas typically associated with activation by the experimental design. The psFA model identifies sparse components and the probabilistic setting provides a natural way to handle parameter uncertainties. The variational Bayesian framework easily extends to more complex noise models than the presently considered.Comment: 10 pages plus 5 pages appendix, Submitted to ICASSP 1

Great apes and human children rationally monitor their decisions

Several species can detect when they are uncertain about what decision to make –revealed by opting out of the choice, or by seeking more information before deciding. But we do not know whether any nonhuman animals recognize when they need more information to make a decision because new evidence contradicts an already-formed belief. Here we explore this ability in great apes and human children. First, we show that after great apes saw new evidence contradicting a prior belief about which of two rewards was greater, they stopped to look for more information before deciding. They did not just register their own uncertainty, but attempted to resolve the contradiction between their belief and the new evidence, indicating rational monitoring of the decision-making process. Children did the same at five years of age, but not at three. In a second study, participants formed a belief about a reward’s location, but then a social partner contradicted them, by picking the opposite location. This time even three-year old children looked for more information, while apes ignored the disagreement. While apes were sensitive only to the conflict in physical evidence, the youngest children were more sensitive to peer disagreement than conflicting physical evidence.PostprintPeer reviewe

VaporLIFT: On-Chip Chemical Synthesis of Glycan Microarrays

Laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) of polymers is a versatile printing method for parallel in situ synthesis of peptides on microarrays. Chemical building blocks embedded in a polymer matrix are transferred and coupled in a desired pattern to a surface, generating peptides on microarrays by repetitive in situ solid-phase synthesis steps. To date, the approach is limited to simple, heat induced chemical reactions. The VaporLIFT method, disclosed here, combines LIFT with chemical vapor glycosylation to rapidly generate glycans on microarray surfaces while maintaining inert, low temperature conditions required for glycosylations. Process design and parameter optimization enables the synthesis of a collection of glycans at defined positions on a glass surface. The synthetic structures are detected by mass spectrometry, fluorescently labeled glycan-binding proteins, and covalent staining with fluorescent dyes. VaporLIFT is ideal for parallel screening of other chemical reactions, that require inert and well-defined reaction conditions

Symplectic structure of N=1 supergravity with anomalies and Chern-Simons terms

The general actions of matter-coupled N=1 supergravity have Peccei-Quinn terms that may violate gauge and supersymmetry invariance. In addition, N=1 supergravity with vector multiplets may also contain generalized Chern-Simons terms. These have often been neglected in the literature despite their importance for gauge and supersymmetry invariance. We clarify the interplay of Peccei-Quinn terms, generalized Chern-Simons terms and quantum anomalies in the context of N=1 supergravity and exhibit conditions that have to be satisfied for their mutual consistency. This extension of the previously known N=1 matter-coupled supergravity actions follows naturally from the embedding of the gauge group into the group of symplectic duality transformations. Our results regarding this extension provide the supersymmetric framework for studies of string compactifications with axionic shift symmetries, generalized Chern-Simons terms and quantum anomalies.Comment: 27 pages; v2: typos corrected; version to be published in Class.Quantum Gra

Electric/magnetic duality for chiral gauge theories with anomaly cancellation

We show that 4D gauge theories with Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation and possible generalized Chern-Simons terms admit a formulation that is manifestly covariant with respect to electric/magnetic duality transformations. This generalizes previous work on the symplectically covariant formulation of anomaly-free gauge theories as they typically occur in extended supergravity, and now also includes general theories with (pseudo-)anomalous gauge interactions as they may occur in global or local N=1 supersymmetry. This generalization is achieved by relaxing the linear constraint on the embedding tensor so as to allow for a symmetric 3-tensor related to electric and/or magnetic quantum anomalies in these theories. Apart from electric and magnetic gauge fields, the resulting Lagrangians also feature two-form fields and can accommodate various unusual duality frames as they often appear, e.g., in string compactifications with background fluxes.Comment: 37 pages; v2: typos corrected and 1 reference adde

Can we distinguish between h^{SM} and h^0 in split supersymmetry?

We investigate the possibility to distinguish between the Standard Model Higgs boson and the lightest Higgs boson in Split Supersymmetry. We point out that the best way to distinguish between these two Higgs bosons is through the decay into two photons. It is shown that there are large differences of several percent between the predictions for \Gamma(h\to\gamma\gamma) in the two models, making possible the discrimination at future photon-photon colliders. Once the charginos are discovered at the next generation of collider experiments, the well defined predictions for the Higgs decay into two photons will become a cross check to identify the light Higgs boson in Split Supersymmetry.Comment: 8 pages, 3 Figures, typos fixed, version published in J.Phys. G31 (2005) 563-56