Foreword

[Excerpt] I first met John Hutson in 2005 when I was the Executive Director of Human Rights First. Human Rights First was working to challenge the use of cruelty by U.S. officials in security detentions, practices that had been used at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere after the attacks on September 11, 2001. We knew that the human rights community acting alone could not influence this debate, so we went looking for national security experts to help us challenge these practices

Anatomy of word and sentence meaning

Reading and listening involve complex psychological processes that recruit many brain areas. The anatomy of processing English words has been studied by a variety of imaging methods. Although there is widespread agreement on the general anatomical areas involved in comprehending words, there are still disputes about the computations that go on in these areas. Examination of the time relations (circuitry) among these anatomical areas can aid in under-standing their computations. In this paper we concentrate on tasks which involve obtaining the meaning of a word in isolation or in relation to a sentence. Our current data support a finding in the literature that frontal semantic areas are active well before posterior areas. We use the subject’s attention to amplify relevant brain areas involved either in semantic classification or in judging the relation of the word to a sentence in order to test the hypothesis that frontal areas are concerned with lexical semantics while posterior areas are more involved in comprehension of propositions that involve several words

Attention and empirical studies of grammar

How is the generation of a grammatical sentence implemented by the human brain? A starting place for such an inquiry lies in linguistic theory. Unfortunately, linguistic theories illuminate only abstract knowledge representations and do not indicate how these representations interact with cognitive architecture to produce discourse. We examine tightly constrained empirical methods to study how grammar interacts with one part of the cognitive architecture, namely attention. Finally, we show that understanding attention as a neural network can link grammatical choice to underlying brain systems. Overall, our commentary supports a multilevel empirical approach that clarifies and expands the connections between cognitive science and linguistics thus advancing the interdisciplinary agenda outlined by Jackendoff

Comments and Recommendations on Proposed Reforms to United States Immigration Policy

The author discusses the legal status of the refugee under two decades of American and international law. After reviewing the implications of the United States accession to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, the Refugee Act of 1980, and current proposals for reform in the refugee/asylum area, he concludes that the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, with several major modifications, would be the most equitable approach to dealing with the present refugee and asylum problems

Comments and Recommendations on Proposed Reforms to United States Immigration Policy

The author discusses the legal status of the refugee under two decades of American and international law. After reviewing the implications of the United States accession to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, the Refugee Act of 1980, and current proposals for reform in the refugee/asylum area, he concludes that the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, with several major modifications, would be the most equitable approach to dealing with the present refugee and asylum problems

Attentional Networks and Consciousness

The term consciousness is an important one in the vernacular of the western literature in many fields. It is no wonder that scientists have assumed that consciousness will be found as a component of the human brain and that we will come to understand its neural basis. However, there is rather little in common between consciousness as the neurologist would use it to diagnose the vegetative state, how the feminist would use it to support raising male consciousness of the economic plight of women and as the philosopher would use it when defining the really hard question of the subjective state of awareness induced by sensory qualities. When faced with this kind of problem it is usual to subdivide the term into more manageable perhaps partly operational definitions. Three meanings that capture aspects of consciousness are: (1) the neurology of the state of mind allowing coherent orientation to time and place (2) the selection of sensory or memorial information for awareness and (3) the voluntary control over overt responses. In each of these cases the mechanisms of consciousness overlap with one or more of the attentional networks that have been studied with the methods of cognitive neuroscience. In this paper we explore the overlap and discuss how to exploit the growing knowledge of attentional networks to constrain ideas of consciousness