Mauricio Rodriguez

Synaesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces photisms, i.e. mental percepts of colours. R is a 20 year old colour blind subject who, in addition to the relatively common grapheme-colour synaesthesia, presents a rarely reported cross modal perception in which a variety of visual stimuli elicit aura-like percepts of colour. In R, photisms seem to be closely related to the affective valence of stimuli and typically bring out a consistent pattern of emotional responses. The present case study suggests that colours might be an intrinsic category of the human brain. We developed an empirical methodology that allowed us to study the subject's otherwise inaccessible phenomenological experience. First, we found that R shows a Stroop effect (delayed response due to interference) elicited by photisms despite the fact that he does not show a regular Stroop with real colours. Secondly, by manipulating the colour context we confirmed that colours can alter R's emotional evaluation of the stimuli. Furthermore, we demonstrated that R's auras may actually lead to a partially inverted emotional spectrum where certain stimuli bring out emotional reactions opposite to the normal ones. These findings can only be accounted for by considering R's subjective colour experience or qualia. Therefore the present paper defends the view that qualia are a useful scientific concept that can be approached and studied by experimental methods.

In a variety of synaesthesia, photisms result from affect-laden stimuli as emotional words, or faces of familiar people. For R, who participated in this study, the sight of a familiar person triggers a mental image of "a human silhouette filled with colour". Subjective descriptions of synaesthetic experiences induced by the visual perception of people's figures and faces show similarities with the reports of those who claim to possess the ability to see the aura. It has been proposed that the purported auric perception may be easily explained by the presence of a specific subtype of cross-modal perception. We analyse the subjective reports of four synaesthetes who experience colours in response to human faces and figures. These reports are compared with descriptions of alleged auric phenomena found in the literature and with claims made by experts in esoteric spheres. The discrepancies found suggest that both phenomena are phenomenologically and behaviourally dissimilar

Osteosarcoma is the most common primary bone cancer. According to medical and biological studies, it has a high genetic complexity, thus, to differentiate the mechanisms of appearance and evolution of this disease is a difficult task. In this paper, we use three simplest and well known mathematical models to describe the behavior of several cell lines of osteosarcoma. First, we use a potential law to describe the tumor growth in immunosuppressed mice; with it we show that the variation of tumor growth has a sublinear behavior without the blow-up phenomenon. Second, the logistic model is used to obtain a good aproximation to the rates of proliferation in cell confluency in in vitro experiments. Third, we use a linear reaction-diffusion model; with it, we describe the diffusion behavior for some cell lines. These three models allow us to give a classification of cell lines according to the rates of tumor growth and proliferation and to the diffusion coefficient. A relationship is found between the rates of the tumor growth, the diffusion coefficient and tumorigenicity. Experimental data are extracted from Lauvrak et al. (British Journal of Cancer 109(8):2228–2236, 2013).

El objetivo es explorar la relación entre el nivel silábico de escritura y la Conciencia Fonológica en niños hispanohablantes. La CF tiene un desarrollo estrechamente ligado al conocimiento del sistema de escritura; las hipótesis principales del presente trabajo son: a) la presencia de estímulos escritos en la tarea de omisión favorece su resolución correcta; b) el orden de presentación de las tareas favorece una mejor realización de CF. Se entrevistó a 40 niños de tercer año de preescolar de escuelas públicas. La investigación hace aportes para el análisis de los procesos por los que atraviesan los niños en el proceso dealfabetización inicial y, por lo tanto, su impacto trasciende al sistema de educación básica para desarrollar situaciones y métodos educativos que contribuyan en la creación de una propuesta didáctica para la alfabetización inicial.The main objective is to explore the relation between the syllabic writing level and phonological awareness in Spanish-speaking children. Phonological awareness has a development very closeto the writing knowledge; the mains hypotheses are: a) the physical presence of writing stimulus favors the construction of better answers; b) the order in which the omission tasks were presented was also shown to be an important factor insolving the phonological awareness task. We interviewed 40 pre-school kids from public system. This research contributes to the analyses the way children learn the alphabetic principle, hence it findings can help to propose didactic situations in early alphabetization

Studies demonstrating the benefits of ethical behavior at an individual level are scarce. The business ethics literature centers its analysis on unethical behaviors and their consequences, rather than ethical behaviors and their benefits. There is now considerable debate on the role of auditors in society and the function of accounting firms in the free market capitalist system. Specifically, the eminently ethical nature of the auditor’s work has been highlighted. Therefore, the aim of our paper is to show the impact of auditors’ sustained ethical behavior: the trust it generates. This trust results in considerable benefits for the firm due to a reduction in the costs of the partner’s supervision of the auditor. The methodology chosen to validate these claims is a survey of partner of the audit firm in auditing companies. The results of this research confirm the hypotheses raised in the theoretical model.

After compulsory secondary education; many teenagers face the process of choosing a university degree. This process involves uncertainties referred to their personal abilities, interests, social expectations and professional future. The present work is aimed at determining whether the reasons behind the selection of a particular university degree differ depending on the chosen degree. Another objective is determining whether these reasons differ significantly according to gender. The sample comprises 983 students belonging to the area of social and legal sciences at the University of Seville. The obtained results reveal the existence of four main reasons behind the selection of university degrees for which significant gender-related differences were observed: easy degree, job opportunities, high wages and provision of social services. Besides, these seven reasons are observed to differ widely in six of the considered degrees

Quillagua es un pequeño oasis junto al río Loa. La etnohistoria registra la convivencia de poblaciones indígenas de distinta tradición cultural. Picas tenían derechos territoriales hacia abajo de un poste de madera pintado y cepillado, mientras Atacamas hacia arriba. Estas categorías no eran geográficas sino indicaciones de una organización social dual. Aquí, indagamos en las expresiones materiales y visuales de esta tensa ocupación intercultural. Ponemos atención al registro arqueológico posterior al 900 d. C., época en que los actores desarrollaron numerosos ejercicios político-sociales, mediante la construcción de un paisaje visual.