Mechanisms Of Social Communication Research Articles

Neuropsychological profile of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and children with Developmental Language Disorder and its relationship with social communication

Objective The objective of this study was to probe neuropsychological mechanisms of social communication in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and children with Developmental Language Disorders (DLD). Due to overlap of symptoms that include social dysfunction, diagnostic boundaries between these two developmental disorders remain unclear. This study hypothesizes that these two groups of children differ in the characteristics and in the underlying mechanisms of their social issues. Method This study examines a wide range of neuropsychological domains in search of a relationship with social communication. A total of 75 children with ASD and 26 children with DLD are included. A cross-battery assessment of neuropsychological functions is conducted, and social communication is evaluated using the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS). Results The neuropsychological profile for the ASD group differs from the DLD group, with the former demonstrating higher scores on Visual Processing and Comprehension, whereas the DLD group scores higher on Fluid Reasoning, Visual Processing and Processing Speed. Correlation analysis reveals that the association between neuropsychological domains and social communication differs between the groups. Discussion Children with ASD and DLD clearly have distinctive neuropsychological profiles—their strengths and weaknesses are not equivalent. Such results motivate broad assessment of neuropsychological functions, as this assists in differentiating ASD from DLD for theragnostic purposes.

Kollektivnaya pamyat' kak sotsial'nyy konstrukt v nemetskom diskurse

The authors address the needs of academicians in different fields of knowledge investigating collective memory and its discursive practices, its various manifestations in language subsystems, and the principles and mechanisms of social communication. Based on the significant potential of cognitive linguistics in this area due to the links between memory and language, the authors present this study аs to how social and cultural institutions regulate collective memory and apply different strategies, tactics, and linguistic means to create positive, negative, and neutralized images of the past in German mass media discourse. This study reveals the most relevant textproducer policies used to manipulate text-recipients and focuses on the most relevant argumentative and compositional tactics used in German mass media to re-actualize and form images of the collective past. The authors view re-actualization of collective memory in mass media in terms of social communication and media priming theories wherein collective memory is a phenomenon socially constructed in discursive practices, which perform selective, interpretive, and reversible functions. Managing the delivery of transformed images of the past to the addressee is aimed at cognitive and axiological changes in the communicative space of the addressee and forming the value judgment of the past. It is considered be possible due to the agent-object relationship of the addresser and addressee. The tactics applied by the addresser contribute not only to distributing and emphasizing some pieces of information but reducing criticism of the mass recipient perception.

Multi-Criteria Seed Selection for Targeting Multi-Attribute Nodes in Complex Networks

Online environments have evolved from the early-stage technical systems to social platforms with social communication mechanisms resembling the interactions which can be found in the real world. Online marketers are using the close relations between the users of social networks to more easily propagate the marketing contents in their advertising campaigns. Such viral marketing campaigns have proven to provide better results than traditional online marketing, hence the increasing research interest in the topic. While the majority of the up-to-date research focuses on maximizing the global coverage and influence in the complete network, some studies have been conducted in the area of budget-constrained conditions as well as in the area of targeting particular groups of nodes. In this paper, a novel approach to targeting multi-attribute nodes in complex networks is presented, in which an MCDA method with various preference weights for all criteria is used to select the initial seeds to best reach the targeted nodes in the network. The proposed approach shows some symmetric characteristics—while the global coverage in the network is decreased, the coverage amongst the targeted nodes grows.

Shared developmental and evolutionary origins for neural basis of vocal–acoustic and pectoral–gestural signaling

Acoustic signaling behaviors are widespread among bony vertebrates, which include the majority of living fishes and tetrapods. Developmental studies in sound-producing fishes and tetrapods indicate that central pattern generating networks dedicated to vocalization originate from the same caudal hindbrain rhombomere (rh) 8-spinal compartment. Together, the evidence suggests that vocalization and its morphophysiological basis, including mechanisms of vocal-respiratory coupling that are widespread among tetrapods, are ancestral characters for bony vertebrates. Premotor-motor circuitry for pectoral appendages that function in locomotion and acoustic signaling develops in the same rh8-spinal compartment. Hence, vocal and pectoral phenotypes in fishes share both developmental origins and roles in acoustic communication. These findings lead to the proposal that the coupling of more highly derived vocal and pectoral mechanisms among tetrapods, including those adapted for nonvocal acoustic and gestural signaling, originated in fishes. Comparative studies further show that rh8 premotor populations have distinct neurophysiological properties coding for equally distinct behavioral attributes such as call duration. We conclude that neural network innovations in the spatiotemporal patterning of vocal and pectoral mechanisms of social communication, including forelimb gestural signaling, have their evolutionary origins in the caudal hindbrain of fishes.

‘Virtual Parrots’ Confirm Mating Preferences of Female Budgerigars

AbstractParrots comprise one of the several taxa in which life‐long learning of new vocal signals used in intraspecific communication is known to occur routinely. The functions and evolutionary bases of this ability are largely unknown. In the budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus), males typically imitate their partner’s contact call type during pair formation. However, a female’s initial choice among unfamiliar males is not based on their production of her call type, because birds without prior social contact rarely produce the same call type. Here, we demonstrate that female budgerigars prefer unfamiliar males with calls that are similar to their own, as measured by spectrogram cross‐correlation, but which are not imitations. This was shown by training females via operant conditioning to control access to movies of courting males and by systematically varying the audio tracks of these movies. Females learned this task easily and interacted with virtual males as if they were real. This methodology will be useful for exploring functions and mechanisms of social communication, because it eliminates the confounding impact of short‐term changes in a stimulus individual’s behavior on a test individual’s response. Our results suggest that the neuroplastic vocal abilities of budgerigars, and perhaps other parrots, have been shaped by sexual selection.

The Artful Stigma

Most forms of body alteration, from dressing to the most extreme forms of soft tissue body modification, are mechanisms of social communication that have clearly defined and broadly understood aesthetic and cultural meanings. The presence of disabled and tattooed people, however, violate social norms and call into question basic cultural conceptions of the body in Western society. The author maintains that tattooed and disabled people have much in common. Historically, both have been exhibited as freaks and been the subject of derision and pity. Likewise, the last decade has witnessed sweeping changes in both communities and because of this represent an ideal metaphor for understanding core elements of human culture. That is, they represent society reduced to its simplest expression and highlight the fact they are in a constant battle against social and personal invisibility.

Song "Dialects" in Three Populations of White-Crowned Sparrows

The phenomenon of dialect variation in bird song, appearing as a consistent difference in the predominant song type between one population and another of the same species, has a special interest for biologists, serving as a focus for attention in discussion of such diverse topics as speciation (for example, Huxley, 1942; Mayr, 1942), learning (Thorpe, 1954, 1958) and the mechanisms of social communication (Marler, 1959). The White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) affords one of the best known cases of such dialect variation among North American birds, and it has been commented upon by many who have observed this species (Blanchard, 1941; Peterson, 1941). Before the ontogenetic basis of such local song variation can be assessed and before its evolutionary significance can be satisfactorily determined, careful descriptions of the nature and extent of the variation are required. This paper seeks to provide some of this necessary information by describing song variation in the individual and in a population, both at one time and from year to year, and also by comparing songs in three populations, two adjacent and one distant.