Deferred imitation tasks have shown that manipulations at encoding can enhance infant learning and memory performance within an age, suggesting that brain maturation alone cannot fully account for all developmental changes in early memory abilities. The present study investigated whether changes in the focus of attention during learning might contribute to improving memory abilities during infa...

Imitation is ubiquitous in positive social interactions. For adult and child observers, it also supports inferences about the participants in such interactions and their social relationships, but the origins of these inferences are obscure. Do infants attach social significance to this form of interaction? Here we test 4- to 5.5-month-old infants' interpretation of imitation, asking if the imit...

The problem of stock data analysis has been widely researched by stock analysts interested in detecting patterns in stocks. Resulting algorithms have dealt with many representations of stock data depending on the problem, many dealing with complex cases where patterns in stock data need to be matched despite differences in scale, translation, or noisiness. However, specific instances arise wher...

This article examines how waiting to imitate a product affects the performance of the imitator compared to the innovator. Specifically, we address two research questions. Under what conditions does imitation erode the advantage of the innovator? What strategies of imitators help overcome the innovator’s advantage? Our main argument is that the increasing availability of information on the innov...

Drawing upon a body of research on the evolution of creativity, this paper proposes a theory of how, when, and why the forward-thinking story-telling abilities of humans evolved, culminating in the visionary abilities of science fiction writers. The ability to recursively chain thoughts together evolved approximately two million years ago. Language abilities, and the ability to shift between di...

Individuals vary in their social skills and motivation, the causes of which remain largely unknown. Here we investigated whether an individual's propensity to interact with others measured within days after birth, and differences in infants' early social environment, may predict a later social skill. Specifically, we tested whether neonatal imitation--newborns' capacity to match modelled action...

Domestication is thought to have influenced the cognitive abilities of dogs underlying their communication with humans, but little is known about its effect on their interactions with conspecifics. Since domestication hypotheses offer limited predictions in regard to wolf-wolf compared to dog-dog interactions, we extend the cooperative breeding hypothesis suggesting that the dependency of wolve...

Cardiac myxomas are rare benign and slowly proliferating neoplasms of uncertain histogenesis with heterogeneous histomorphology and variable and sometimes clinically quite malignant pathological manifestations. Majority of cardiac myxoma occur sporadically while a relatively small proportion of diagnosed cases develop as a part of Carney complex syndrome with established familial pattern of inh...

The Tactical Systems Division of Rockwell International is a supplier of infrared (IR) seeker based weapons systems. An important part of their activities is the design of missile seeker systems. During the conceptual design phase of these systems, an engineering concept team makes decisions which will ultimately affect the quality, cost, performance, availability and reliability of the weapon....