Access to other minds once presupposed other individuals’ expressions and narrations. Today, several methods have been developed which can measure brain states relevant for assessments of mental states without 1st person overt external behavior or speech. Functional magnetic resonance imaging and trace conditioning are used clinically to identify patterns of activity in the brain that suggest the presence of consciousness in people suffering from severe consciousness disorders and methods to communicate cerebrally with patients who are motorically unable to communicate. The (...) techniques are also used non-clinically to access subjective awareness in adults and infants. In this article we inspect technical and theoretical limits on brain–machine interface access to other minds. We argue that these techniques hold promises of important medical breakthroughs, open up new vistas of communication, and of understanding the infant mind. Yet they also give rise to ethical concerns, notably misuse as a consequence of hypes and misinterpretations. (shrink)

Hasta ahora, el acceso a otras mentes presuponía las expresiones y narraciones de los individuos. En la actualidad, se han desarrollado varios métodos que pueden medir los estados cerebrales relevantes para valorar las facultades mentales sin que se manifieste en 1ª persona habla o comportamiento externo alguno. La resonancia magnética funcional y el condicionamiento de huella se emplean fuera del ámbito clínico para acceder a la conciencia subjetiva; se utilizan clínicamente para identificar patrones de actividad en el cerebro que sugieran (...) la presencia de conciencia en personas que sufren trastornos graves de conciencia y métodos para comunicarse cerebralmente con pacientes con incapacidad motora para comunicarse. En este capítulo, examinamos las posibilidades y los límites del acceso a otras mentes mediante interfaces cerebro-máquina. Exponemos que estas técnicas auguran importantes avances médicos y abren nuevas perspectivas de comunicación y para entender la conciencia, sin embargo, también plantean preocupaciones éticas, en especial el uso incorrecto como consecuencia de las expectativas creadas y las malas interpretaciones. (shrink)

While poverty all over the world is more typical and extreme in rural contexts, interventions to improve cognition in low socioeconomic status children are for the most part based on studies conducted in urban populations. This paper investigate how poverty and rural or urban settings affect child cognitive performance. Executive functions and non-verbal intelligence performance, as well as individual and environmental information was obtained from 131 5-year-old children. For the same level of SES, children in rural settings performed consistently worse (...) than children in urban settings. These differences could be accounted mostly by the months of past preschool attendance and the father’s completed level of education. These results should inform policies and programs for children living in rural poverty worldwide, and specially in Latin America. (shrink)

Seventy-three children between 6 and 7 years of age were presented with a problem having ambiguous subgoal ordering. Performance in this task showed reliable fingerprints: a non-monotonic dependence of performance as a function of the distance between the beginning and the end-states of the problem, very high levels of performance when the first move was correct, and states in which accuracy of the first move was significantly below chance. These features are consistent with a non-Markov planning agent, with an inherently (...) inertial decision process, and that uses heuristics and partial problem knowledge to plan its actions. We applied a statistical framework to fit and test the quality of a proposed planning model. Our framework allows us to parse out independent contributions to problem-solving based on the construction of the value function and on general mechanisms of the search process in the tree of solutions. We show that the latter are correlated with children's performance on an independent measure of planning, while the former is highly domain specific. (shrink)