Novel and potential future therapeutic options in systemic autoimmune diseases.

Autoimmune inflammation is caused by the loss of tolerance to specific self-antigens and can result in organ-specific or systemic disorders. Systemic autoimmune diseases affect a significant portion of the population with an increasing rate of incidence, which means that is essential to have effective therapies to control these chronic disorders. Unfortunately, several patients with systemic autoimmune diseases do not respond at all or just partially respond to available conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs and targeted therapies.

Preschoolers retain more details from event sequences 1 week following an in-group demonstration.

Previous research highlights that the learning processes of preschool-aged children are influenced by the cultural group membership of the information sources. As of yet, however, no study has aimed to explore the influence of cultural group membership on the long-term retention of novel information. In the current study, 4-year-old children observed three event sequences that were demonstrated by either an adult speaking their native language or a foreign language speaker.

Can 18-Month-Olds Revise Attributed Beliefs?

Successful social interactions rely on flexibly tracking and revising others' beliefs. These can be revised prospectively, new events leading to new beliefs, or retrospectively, when realizing that an attribution may have been incorrect. However, whether infants are capable of such belief revisions is an open question.

Can group representations based on relational cues warrant the rich inferences typically drawn from group membership?

Pietraszewski's model - though promising in many respects - needs to be extended so that it can explain the multitude of rich inferences that people draw from group membership. In this commentary, we highlight some facets of group thinking, especially from the field of developmental psychology, that cannot be unambiguously accounted for by a model that is built solely on relational cues.

Individuation of agents based on psychological properties in 10 month-old infants.

What makes agents fundamentally different from each other from the viewpoint of a 10-month-old infant? While infants at this age can already individuate human-like objects from non-humanlike ones and self-propelled agents from inert objects, little is known of when and how they start individuating within the domain of agents. What is clear from previous studies is that differences in surface and dynamic features are not sufficient. We hypothesized that mental properties-in this case the agents' preferences-can serve as an individuating property.

Quantitative Analysis of Core Lipid Production in at Different Scales.

Archaeal lipids have a high biotechnological potential, caused by their high resistance to oxidative stress, extreme pH values and temperatures, as well as their ability to withstand phospholipases. Further, methanogens, a specific group of archaea, are already well-established in the field of biotechnology because of their ability to use carbon dioxide and molecular hydrogen or organic substrates. In this study, we show the potential of the model organism to act both as a carbon dioxide based biological methane producer and as a potential supplier of archaeal lipids.

Representing social categories based on shared cultural knowledge in adults.

The study investigated whether adults rely on the cues of shared cultural knowledge when forming social category representations. We used a modified version of the memory confusion paradigm, where participants are presented with the photographs of people differing along social category distinctions while listening to utterances associated with the pictures. In the test phase, the task is to match the utterances to the photographs.

Social categorization based on permanent versus transient visual traits in neurotypical children and children with autism spectrum disorder.

The present study was designed to test the relative weight of different types of category markers in children's representations of social and biological kinds. We reasoned that in order to efficiently navigate through the mesh network of overlapping social categories, the representational system dedicated to processing information about social groups should be prepared to flexibly switch between potential ways of categorizing fellow humans. Thus, we hypothesized that children would assign more relevance to transient but symbolic features, such as shirt colour, when categorizing humans than other animal species.

[Small steps toward an empathic multicultural world through a new perspective of social categorization as a tool in adaptive learning].

The investigation of the role and the mechanisms of social categorization has been in the focus of psychological research for quite a long time. However, the developmental approach to categorization and the arrangement of empirical findings within this field into a unified framework have received little attention so far. Based on the currently available evidence the paper proposes a new theory of 'culturally shared knowledge'.

Young Children Selectively Imitate Models Conforming to Social Norms.

This study investigated whether toddlers would selectively imitate a demonstrator who exhibits familiarity with cultural practices in their tool-using habits over a demonstrator who consistently uses tools in an unconventional way. Three-year-old children ( = 45) watched videos depicting two models, one of whom performed tool-using actions in a conventional way, while the other model deviated from social conventions. Then, both models introduced a technique to build a tower (differing in one element).

Reducing Hematologic Toxicity With Short Course Postexposure Prophylaxis With Zidovudine for HIV-1 Exposed Infants With Low Transmission Risk.

Using retrospectively collected data from 383 infants born to HIV-1-infected mothers receiving antiretroviral therapy, we compared transmission rates and hematologic toxicity between infants receiving 2-week (short course) versus longer duration zidovudine postexposure prophylaxis. Short course resulted in lower hematologic toxicity without evidence of increased vertical transmission risk.

Auditory⁻Visual Matching of Conspecifics and Non-Conspecifics by Dogs and Human Infants.

We tested whether dogs and 14⁻16-month-old infants are able to integrate intersensory information when presented with conspecific and heterospecific faces and vocalisations. The looking behaviour of dogs and infants was recorded with a non-invasive eye-tracking technique while they were concurrently presented with a dog and a female human portrait accompanied with acoustic stimuli of female human speech and a dog's bark. Dogs showed evidence of both con- and heterospecific intermodal matching, while infants' looking preferences indicated effective auditory⁻visual matching only when presented with the audio and visual stimuli of the non-conspecifics.

Visual Fixation Patterns During Viewing of Half-Face Stimuli in Adults: An Eye-Tracking Study.

Human faces play a special role in social cognition, since as a core signal of interpersonal communication, they convey various kinds of information (e.g., about sex, age, race, emotions, intentions).

Retrospective attribution of false beliefs in 3-year-old children.

A current debate in psychology and cognitive science concerns the nature of young children's ability to attribute and track others' beliefs. Beliefs can be attributed in at least two different ways: prospectively, during the observation of belief-inducing situations, and in a retrospective manner, based on episodic retrieval of the details of the events that brought about the beliefs. We developed a task in which only retrospective attribution, but not prospective belief tracking, would allow children to correctly infer that someone had a false belief.

Learning how to use a tool: Mutually exclusive tool-function mappings are selectively acquired from linguistic in-group models.

The current study investigated whether 4-year-olds used language as a cue to social group membership to infer whether the tool-use behavior of a model needed to be encoded as indicative of the tool's function. We built on children's tendency to treat functions as mutually exclusive, that is, their propensity to refrain from using the same tool for more than one function. We hypothesized that children would form mutually exclusive tool-function mappings only if the source of the function information was a linguistic in-group person (native) as opposed to an out-group (foreign) person.

Gaze-Following and Reaction to an Aversive Social Interaction Have Corresponding Associations with Variation in the OXTR Gene in Dogs but Not in Human Infants.

It has been suggested that dogs' remarkable capacity to use human communicative signals lies in their comparable social cognitive skills; however, this view has been questioned recently. The present study investigated associations between oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) polymorphisms and social behavior in human infants and dogs with the aim to unravel potentially differential mechanisms behind their responsiveness to human gaze. Sixteen-month-old human infants ( = 99) and adult Border Collie dogs ( = 71) participated in two tasks designed to test (1) their use of gaze-direction as a cue to locate a hidden object, and (2) their reactions to an aversive social interaction (using the still face task for children and a threatening approach task for dogs).