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The role of gender in political violence
Publication date: August 2020Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 34Author(s): Rose McDermottGender plays a prominent role in many aspects of political violence. First, it contributes to its occurrence. Second, sexual violence causes enormous suffering during conflict. Last, sustainable peacekeeping depends on female inclusion and participation. The prominence of gender in political violence rests on the dominance of men over women in many aspects of political, social and economic life. Inequities in family law and perversions in the marriage market, especially polygyny, contribute to the perpetuation of ...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 13, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

The convergence of gambling and monetised gaming activities
Publication date: February 2020Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 31Author(s): Daniel L King, Paul H DelfabbroA recent innovation contributing to the massive growth and profitability of the gaming industry has been the development of in-game monetisation. In-game purchasing features (e.g. ‘loot boxes’, ‘skins’, and other microtransactions) have also generated debate in some jurisdictions as to whether some activities constitute a form of gambling. This brief review presents some academic perspectives and recent studies that have examined the validity of this claim. Evidence has focused on the na...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 10, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Restoring vision at the fovea
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Juliette E McGregorIn humans high quality, high acuity visual experience is mediated by the fovea, a tiny, specialized patch of retina containing the locus of fixation. Despite this, vision restoration strategies are typically developed in animal models without a fovea. While electrical prostheses have been approved by regulators, as yet they have failed to restore high quality, high acuity vision in patients. Approaches under pre-clinical development include regenerative cell therapies, optogenetics and chemical photosensiti...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 10, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Three-dimensional stimuli and environment for studies of color constancy
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Yoko MizokamiWe perceive the stable surface color of objects even if the reflected light changes depending on illumination color. This perceptual property is known as color constancy. To understand color constancy in real life it is essential to conduct experiments within real three-dimensional (3-D) space. Color constancy is generally better and more stable for 3-D stimuli compared with two-dimensional (2-D) stimuli. Color, shape, and material properties are not represented precisely in a 2-D environment, such as images or p...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 10, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

The evolutionary ecology of bird and reptile photoreceptor spectral sensitivities
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Daniel OsorioBirds and reptiles typically have five spectral types of visual pigment: the rod pigment, plus four cone pigments, which probably gives them tetrachromatic color vision. This system, which was inherited from ancestral vertebrates, can vary under natural selection. Most obvious is the loss of visual pigments in nocturnal lineages including mammals. This review focuses on lineages that retain the ‘tetrachromatic’ retina. Here, photoreceptor spectral sensitivities and the relative numbers of different photorecep...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 10, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Comparison of gambling profiles based on strategic versus non-strategic preferences
Publication date: February 2020Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 31Author(s): Susana Jiménez-Murcia, Roser Granero, Fernando Fernández-Aranda, José M MenchónGambling disorder (GD) has been associated with significantly impaired functioning. However, the empirical evidence available on gambling phenomenology based on the preferred forms of gambling, including the factors that are responsible for the choice of games and the clinical correlates of the preferred subtypes, is very limited. The few studies comparing clusters of GD patients defined by their preferred gambling activities usually classify g...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 10, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Gambling-related consumer credit use and debt problems: a brief review
Publication date: February 2020Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 31Author(s): Thomas B Swanton, Sally M GainsburyPeople experiencing problems with gambling may use consumer credit to cover expenses and/or continue gambling. This may contribute to debt problems and psychological distress, both of which may have pre-existed (and potentially motivated) their gambling. This review found little empirical investigation of patterns of consumer credit use by gamblers, despite borrowing money being a diagnostic criterion for gambling disorder and financial harms being one of the most commonly reported problems....
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 10, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Cortical communication and the comparison of colors
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): John Mollon, Marina DanilovaThe hues or the colorimetric purities of a pair of colored targets can be compared with similar precision whether the targets are juxtaposed or fall at well-separated positions in the visual field. This is the case even if the stimuli are 10° apart and fall in opposite hemifields. What could be the neural processes that underlie such comparisons? We are led to ask whether the long-range, white-matter tracts of the brain constitute a neural net (where representations are embodied in the weightings ...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 8, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Ambiguous chromatic neural representations: perceptual resolution by grouping
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Steven K ShevellTwo basic principles of human color vision are (1) color is not in light but instead constructed within the (human) perceiver and (2) in natural viewing, photoreceptor signals fail to determine uniquely the colors we see. The visual system, therefore, must resolve the ambiguity implicit in the neural representation of the stimulus. This paper focuses on a perceptual property used by the visual system to resolve ambiguity when two or more parts of a scene share the same ambiguous chromatic neural representation...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 7, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Stress and gambling
Publication date: February 2020Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 31Author(s): Tony W Buchanan, Sara D McMullin, Catherine Baxley, Jeremiah WeinstockGambling is a multi-billion-dollar industry that many people engage with on a regular basis with no adverse effects. For many, gambling is a fun hobby that does not negatively impact their lives. There is, however, a significant minority whose gambling is maladaptive and causes significant adverse consequences, which may lead to personal and financial devastation. Stress and how one responds to stress may be a significant factor in determining who may gambl...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 5, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Representing stuff in the human brain
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Alexandra C Schmid, Katja DoerschnerOur experience of materials does not merely comprise judgments of single properties such as glossiness or roughness but is rather made up of a multitude of simultaneous impressions of qualities. To understand the neural mechanisms yielding such complex impressions, we suggest that it is necessary to extend existing experimental approaches to those that view material perception as a distributed and dynamic process. A distributed representations framework not only fits better with our percept...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 4, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Challenges to color constancy in a contemporary light
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Anya HurlbertColor constancy is a prime example of a perceptual constancy, giving stability to mental representations of objects in an unstable world. Yet color constancy is highly variable, depending on the illumination, the object and its context, and the viewer. Color constancy is particularly challenged by artificial lights that differ from the natural illuminations under which human vision evolved. The rapid developments in solid-state lighting technologies revive the need to scrutinise the limits of color constancy, to ...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 4, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Loss-chasing in gambling behaviour: neurocognitive and behavioural economic perspectives
Publication date: February 2020Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 31Author(s): Ke Zhang, Luke ClarkLoss-chasing describes the tendency of a gambler to amplify their betting in an effort to recoup prior losses. It is widely regarded as a defining feature of disordered gambling, and a hallmark of the transition from recreational to disordered gambling. We consider the empirical evidence for this central role of loss-chasing in disordered gambling. We highlight multiple behavioural expressions of chasing, including between-session and within-session chasing. From a neurocognitive perspective, loss-chasing ...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 4, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Steps towards neural decoding of colors
We describe how probabilistic models coupled with fMRI-guided microelectrode recordings from inferior-temporal macaque cortex (IT) could help us understand color decoding: i.e. how appearance is extracted from the neuronal responses evoked by a stimulus. Neurons in IT respond to a narrow range of colors with their peak responses scattered around the color circle. We discuss how intra-cellular processes and cortical circuits could generate such tuning curves, and how they approximate optimal Bayesian decoders in winner-take-all schemes. (Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences)
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - November 1, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Color categorization in infants
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): John Maule, Anna FranklinIn human infants trichromatic vision is functional within the first few months of life. Infants also make categorical responses to color — appearing to group together similar colors, but with distinct boundaries. Recent developments have revealed a candidate neural basis for infant color categories — the low-level cone-opponent mechanisms of color vision. These pre-linguistic boundaries appear to drive infant looking behavior, and may provide discontinuity in color perception around which linguist...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - October 5, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research