Innate Foundations Research Articles

When (fake) beauty turns ugly: Plastic surgery as a moral violation

Plastic surgery is a popular form of appearance modification. Nonetheless, attitudes toward the recipients of plastic surgery remain divided. These attitudes may be indicative of an underlying moralisation of plastic surgery in contemporary society. To test this hypothesis, we examined perceptions of plastic surgery in the context of Moral Foundations Theory – a formal framework in which morality is categorised into five innate foundations: Sanctity, Care, Fairness, Loyalty, and Authority. Across two complementary online surveys with samples of 385 undergraduate psychology students (75% female) and 1533 sexual minority men, respectively, we investigated participants’ valuation of each moral foundation and their moral condemnation of plastic surgery. Results indicated that scores on Sanctity predicted moral condemnation, such that participants who valued Sanctity more highly were more likely to perceive plastic surgery as morally fraught. Sanctity encompasses naturalness and purity elements of morality. As such, results were explored in the context of two broad theories: feminist theory, which posits that unnatural beauty is perceived as unfavourably as ugliness itself, and evolutionary theory, which suggests that unnatural stimuli are moralised because they elicit innate and powerful disgust reactions. Ultimately, we concluded that the underlying societal moralisation of plastic surgery is attributable to perceptions of plastic surgery as fundamentally unnatural. Implications for interventions targeted at eradicating plastic surgery condemnation are discussed.

Human Dimensions: Natural History as the Innate Foundation of Ecology

Human Dimensions: Natural History as the Innate Foundation of Ecology

Imitation and Ability to Form Social Experience Based on a Mental Model in Preschoolers

The article features basic violations and absence of “mental model” as an ability to identify with another person’s actions in the process of imitation. 124 preschoolers were studied to compare the development of mental model and imitation. They were divided into three contrasting groups: normally developing children, children with special needs, and children with delayed speech development. The study revealed imitation differences in relation to the level of the mental model. The obtained data complement the understanding of the innate foundations of social cognition. Violations associated with imitation can explain the cognitive aspects of the mental development deficit in preschool children. They can be a universal symptom that disrupts early social interaction and ultimately leads to various social and communication deficits. For a productive implementation of simulation schemes, it is necessary to understand and recognize the mental states of the interlocutor and their organization into mental models (single, situational, or extra-narrative). Imitation arises when the children are able to integrate information about themselves and about others and can combine their own intentions and the intentions of others in relation to an external object (triadic relations).

Animal Communication: Origins of Sequential Structure in Birdsong

Culturally transmitted behaviors have an innate foundation, but the detailed sequential structure of such complex, acquired behaviors is often an outcome of historical accidents. New research has identified innate predispositions for structuring vocal sequences in culturally acquired birdsong.

Progress in Understanding Auditory Scene Analysis

In this paper, I make the following claims: (1) Subjective experience is tremendously useful in guiding productive research. (2) Studies of auditory scene analysis (ASA) in adults, newborn infants, and non-human animals (e.g., in goldfish or pigeons) establish the generality of ASA and suggest that it has an innate foundation. (3) ASA theory does not favor one musical style over another. (4) The principles used in the composition of polyphony (slightly modified) apply not only to one particular musical style or culture but to any form of layered music. (5) Neural explanations of ASA do not supersede explanations in terms of capacities; the two are complementary. (6) In computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) – ASA by computer systems – or any adequate theory of ASA, the most difficult challenge will be to discover how the contributions of a very large number of types of acoustical evidence and top-down schemas (acquired knowledge about the sound sources in our environments), can be coordinated without producing conflict that disables the system. (7) Finally I argue that the movement of a listener within the auditory scene provides him/her/it with rich information that should not be ignored by ASA theorists and researchers.

Moral Mind-Sets

Moral foundations theory contends that people’s morality goes beyond concerns about justice and welfare, and asserts that humans have five innate foundations of morality: harm and fairness (individualizing foundations) and in-group loyalty, deference to authority, and purity (binding foundations). The current research investigates whether people’s moral judgments are consistently informed by these five values, or whether individualizing and binding foundations might be differentially endorsed depending on individuals’ mind-sets. Results from our study demonstrated that when participants were experimentally manipulated to think abstractly (vs. concretely), which presumably makes their higher level core values salient, they increased in their valuations of the individualizing foundations and decreased in their valuations of the binding foundations. This effect was not moderated by political ideology. Implications and areas for future directions are discussed.

Recognition of Human Cytomegalovirus by Human Primary Immunoglobulins Identifies an Innate Foundation to an Adaptive Immune Response

Most primates, including humans, are chronically infected with cospecifically evolved, potentially pathogenic CMV. Abs that bind a 10-aa linear epitope (antigenic determinant 2 site 1) within the extracellular domain of human CMV glycoprotein B neutralize viral infectivity. In this study, we show that genes generated by recombinations involving two well-conserved human germline V elements (IGHV3-30 and IGKV3-11), and IGHJ4, encode primary Ig molecules that bind glycoprotein B at this key epitope. These particular V(H), J(H), and V(kappa) genes enable humans to generate through recombination and N nucleotide addition, a useful frequency of primary Igs that efficiently target this critical site on human CMV and thus confer an innate foundation for a specific adaptive response to this pathogen.

The cradle of knowledge: development of perception in infancy

In the past twenty-five years there has been an explosion in research on the development of perception. This research has produced discoveries at multiple levels: ecological analyses of the information available for perception, models of representation and process, and improved understanding of biological mechanisms. In this comprehensive treatment of infant perception, Philip Kellman and Martha Arterberry bring together work at these multiple levels to produce a new picture of perception's origins. The emphasis is on perceptual knowledge -- how one comes to perceive the world; what information, processes, and mechanisms produce this knowledge; and how perceptual processes change over time. They examine early perception in various domains, such as object, space, motion, intermodal, and speech perception and attempt to discover the starting points and paths of development of each. By focusing on individual experiments, they also give the reader a view of how research is conducted, including the interplay of data and theory. Two families of views compete to describe how perception begins and develops. The authors show that the traditional constructivist view, emphasizing the construction of perceptual reality through extended learning, has been disconfirmed by experimental data in many domains. An ecological view, emphasizing the role of evolution in preparing infants to perceive, provides a better overall account, but the authors show that both innate foundations and learning contribute to perceptual development. The authors also examine interactions between infants' perceptual abilities and their cognitive, social, and motor development. They argue that the new picture of early perception requires a revised view of the beginnings of human cognitive and social development.

A vigilance model for latent learning.

The author proposes a heuristic model for latent learning. It is concluded that to regard academic learning as qualitatively different from other forms of learning is to deny evolutionary continuity. Academic learning is not a unitary process governed by a single set of parameters. In addition, it is observed that the problem of student motivation may very well turn out to be purely academic. The instructional technique for a captive audience of a class may be so structured as to make the direction of attention irresistible, the performance of a response, when needed, compelling, and the acquisition of knowledge inevitable. Vigilance is an instance of innate foundation. Its most striking characteristics are its universality in the animal world, its ready evocation by a wide range of stimuli, and its apparent behavior and physiological manifestations. The last two are the natural resources for objective investigation, and the first may well be the basis of broad and valid generalizations.

THE PARENTAL STRATAGEMS OF BIRDS

Summary Sonic birds steal unobtrusively from the nest while a man is a long way off, others wait until he is almost within arm's length. The same individual may abruptly shift from one of these procedures to the other; or one member of a pair may follow the first method and the other the second. Both of these modes of departure arc strategically sound; but any intermediate course needlessly exposes the nest to detection. If a bird delays with its eggs or young until an enemy has come very close it has one last resource: it may try to lure the intruder away by a distraction display, or “feigning injury”. Typical injury‐simulation is merely a highly developed form of conspicuous departure from the nest, of which many examples are given. Such departure, which does not suggest disablement, may be either over the ground or by a peculiar slow flight. Injury‐simulation may begin after an unsuccessful attempt to defend the nest. Birds are careful to select unobstructed ground for this display, which may be interrupted while they pass over tangled vegetation and resumed in a clear area on the farther side. Endless variations in the mode of giving distraction displays suggest great discrimination and the intelligent adaptation of an essentially innate pattern to fluctuating circumstances. Injury‐simulation is on the whole confined to species whqse nests are so placed that it is likely to be effective, chiefly to those whose open nests are on or near the ground. It is rare in birds whose eggs are placed high in trees, in holes, in elaborate closed nests, or in crowded colonies. There are many records of the effectiveness of distraction displays with men and other mammals. But a Sclater's Antbird Myrmeciza exsul tried unsuccessfully to lure an Agouti Dasyprocta from its nest. Of other parental stratagems, “freezing” in an upright posture on the nest's rim has been observed only in the Cedar Waxwing Bombycilla cedrorum. Nest‐building to distract attention from a near‐by occupied nest, and stuffing with fresh material the door of an occupied nest, have been reported for certain wrens. Eggs are seldom covered over during the parents' absence, although the expedient would seem to afford some protection. As fledglings fly weakly from the nest, the adults of some species fly close above them in “shielding flight”, which may give a measure of security from aerial predators. Distraction displays appear to be acquired with relative ease by species whose mode of nesting makes them effective, and are perhaps almost as easily lost when changed nesting habits render them useless. Hence it is necessary to postulate an innate foundation, widespread in birds, upon which these displays can be built with readily acquired genetic modifications. It is suggested that this foundation is the bird's intelligence or ability to learn by experience the effectiveness of this ruse. In a race of birds in which individually acquired distraction displays are somewhat frequent, genetic mutations tending to reinforce or elaborate such behaviour, at the same time making it heritable, would at once have “survival value”, which otherwise they might lack. It is probable, then, that distraction displays have often been built up by “organic selection”, or the gradual replacement of individually acquired traits by genetically transmitted characters.