Conjecturing Harmful Intent and Preemptive Strike in Paranoia

Damage to Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Impairs Judgment of Harmful Intent

Moral judgments, whether delivered in ordinary experience or in the courtroom, depend on our ability to infer intentions. We forgive unintentional or accidental harms and condemn failed attempts to harm. Prior work demonstrates that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) deliver abnormal judgments in response to moral dilemmas and that these patients are especially im...

Interactive Conjecturing with Vega

Running title: Prefrontal damage impairs judgment of intent Damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex impairs judgment of harmful intent

events (Bechara et al., 1997; Damasio et al., 1990), we predicted that patients with VMPC damage would fail to perceive the emotional significance of harmful intentions (e.g., unobservable mental states), and therefore deliver abnormal moral judgments in the case that judgments depend on emotional responses to such abstract representational content. We predicted that, as a direct result, VMPC p...

Conjecturing and Proving as Rational Behaviors

My contribution relies on the research work carried on in the last fifteen years by the Genoa Research Group in Mathematics Education, which mainly concerned the early approach to conjecturing and proving (grades VII-VIII) and related cognitive and epistemological issues. Our results have been presented at the PME Conferences in Lisbon (1994, PME-XVIII: research report presented by Boero), Reci...

Interpretation biases in paranoia.

Information in the environment is frequently ambiguous in meaning. Emotional ambiguity, such as the stare of a stranger, or the scream of a child, encompasses possible good or bad emotional consequences. Those with elevated vulnerability to affective disorders tend to interpret such material more negatively than those without, a phenomenon known as "negative interpretation bias." In this study ...