Can the behaviorist's insistence on distinguishing animal from human cognition be reconciled with evolutionary continuity? By Frans B. M. de Waal Do Animals Think? by Clive D.L. Wynne Princeton University Press, 2004; $26.95 Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings by Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn Yale University Press, 2003; $35.00 IF YOUR DOG DROPS A TENNIS BALL in front of you and looks up at you with tail wagging, do you figure she wants to play? How naive! Who says dogs have desires and intentions? Her behavior is merely the product of reinforcement: she has been rewarded for it in the past. Many scientists have grown up with the so-called law of effect, the idea that all behavior is conditioned by reward and punishment. This principle of learning was advocated by a dominant school of twentieth-century psychological thought known as American behaviorism. The school’s founders, John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, were happy to explain all conceivable behavior within the narrow confines of what Skinner called “operant conditioning.” The mind, if such a thing even existed, remained a black box. In the early days, the behaviorists applied their doctrine in equal measure to people and other animals. Watson, for instance, to demonstrate the power of his methods, intentionally created a phobia for furry objects in a human baby. Initially “little Albert” was unafraid of a tame white rat. But after Watson paired each appearance of the rat with sharp noises right behind poor Albert’s head, fear of rats was the inevitable outcome. Even human speech was thought to be the product of simple reinforcement learning. The behaviorists’ goal of unifying the science of behavior was a noble one—but alas, outside academia the masses resisted. They stubbornly refused to accept that their own behavior could be explained without considering thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Don’t we all have mental lives, don’t we look into the future, aren’t we rational beings? Eventually, the behaviorists caved in and exempted the bipedal ape from their theory of everything. Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2004

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
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Link ID: 5553 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Stan Persky Clive D.L. Wynne, Do Animals Think? (Princeton, 268 pages, 2004) The answer to the title question of Clive Wynne’s book, Do Animals Think?, is: Not very much. I mention this right off the bat not only to dispel unnecessary suspense but because Wynne, a University of Florida psychology prof and the author of an earlier textbook on animal cognition, writes so charmingly about the behaviour of honeybees, bats, pigeons, and dolphins that one almost forgets that for considerable stretches of Do Animals Think? he says very little about thinking at all. But his survey of what we do and don’t know about non-human animal thinking and doing is a useful antidote to widespread sentimentality about what goes on in the brains of birds, beasts, and the rest of us. Students in the first-year university philosophy classes that I teach often believe that their dogs, cats, budgies, and goldfish are thinking pretty much the same thoughts they are. Unfortunately, some of them are right, I point out—but I point it out only when I’m in a grumpy mood. Copyright © 2002 Dooney's Cafe

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
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Link ID: 5551 - Posted: 06.24.2010

David Salt, ABC Science Online — A person's mental ability as a child could well be an indicator of their chances of surviving to a ripe old age, according to a landmark study which has followed up on surveys carried out in the first half of the last century. Professor Ian Deary from the Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, presented findings of an ongoing investigation during a two-day symposium on aging held last week at the Australian National University. "This is by far the longest follow-up study of mental ability differences in the scientific literature," said Deary, who led the research. The study was remarkable because it spanned a long time period, included a large number of people and managed to get around some of the problems faced by previous studies into how age affects mental ability. Copyright © 2003 Discovery Communications Inc.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4308 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mutations that produce small brains may reveal how human intelligence evolved John Travis In the 1960s, Pakistan built a mammoth dam on the river Jhelum to generate electric power and store water for irrigation. Known as Mangla, the dam created an upstream lake that displaced about 20,000 families from the district of Mirpur. Around the same time, England's textile industry was facing a major shortage of skilled laborers, especially in the county of Yorkshire. Many of the people from Mirpur who were displaced by Mangla traveled to Bradford and other Yorkshire districts. The coincidental timing of the dam's construction and Yorkshire's need for workers has, nearly 4 decades later, provided scientists with insight into how the human brain develops and, possibly, into how it evolved from the smaller brains of our hominid ancestors. A few years ago, a physician from St. James' University Hospital in Leeds, England, noticed something unusual among the Pakistani families he examined at a Bradford clinic. "I was seeing a lot of children who had microcephaly with moderate mental retardation but no other disease features," recalls clinical geneticist C. Geoffrey Woods. Microcephaly is a rare condition characterized by an abnormally small head, the result of an undersized brain. In particular, the cerebral cortex—the layers of nerve cells that cover the brain's surface and are the seat of higher reasoning—is shrunken. "The cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that, for better or worse, makes us human," notes Christopher A. Walsh, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "Children who have abnormal development of the cerebral cortex fail to achieve the kind of talents we pride ourselves on, such as language." From Science News, Vol. 162, No. 20, Nov. 16, 2002, p. 312. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 0: ; Chapter 20:
Link ID: 3025 - Posted: 06.24.2010

John Travis Neuroscientists—normally a reserved group—were laughing at William M. Kelley's presentation. He wasn't upset, however. The researcher had just shown the scientists a clip from the sitcom Seinfeld to illustrate how his group investigates the brain's response to humor. With the aid of Jerry Seinfeld and his friends, as well as the animated characters of the cartoon The Simpsons , Kelley and his colleagues have found that different brain regions spark with activity when a person gets a joke versus when he or she reacts to it. "Humor is a significant part of what makes us unique as human beings," says Kelley, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. He presented his group's brain-imaging data last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Orlando, Fla. From Science News, Vol. 162, No. 20, Nov. 16, 2002, p. 308. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 3024 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — A British geneticist has proposed a theory, which is gaining ground, as to why humans are conscious and aware. If proven correct, the theory not only would explain one of science's greatest mysteries, the "hard problem" of awareness, but it may also, in future, allow for the development of artificially intelligent, conscious computers. In a paper published in the latest issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, awareness is said to be generated by the brain's electromagnetic field, which is a product of the over 100 billion electrically active neurons in the brain. Copyright © 2002 Discovery Communications Inc.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
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Link ID: 2635 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Fern Shen The Washington Post Why do humans use only 14 percent of their brains? Actually, that's not true. Pretty much, your whole brain is functioning, all the time, even when you're asleep. But there's a popular myth that the average person uses just 10 percent — or some small fraction — of his or her brain. People who say this are usually trying to make the point that if only we used more of our brain, we could solve complex problems or perform amazing psychic feats. But that big gray blob in your skull actually is doing some amazing things already. Think of it as a complex network that's always powered-up. Different areas may be especially active at certain times, but it's always "on" — and busier than you think. Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
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Link ID: 2632 - Posted: 06.24.2010

At least a third of the communicating cells in a front part of the brain critical for reasoning and planning seem adept at keeping track of the number of things seen, report scientists funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. What’s more, they even pick favorite quantities. Activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys trained to judge the number of dots on a computer screen reflected changes in quantity — peaking for a preferred number and then dropping off progressively as the discrepancy between numbers of dots increased, the researchers found. The study adds to mounting evidence showing how the prefrontal cortex categorizes information from the senses. Drs. Andreas Nieder, David Freeman and Earl Miller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, report on their findings in the September 6 2002 Science. “Judging the difference between the number of items we see is one way of categorizing and making sense of them,” explained Miller. “This capacity to quickly glean concepts and meaning from experience underlies the “executive” functions of the prefrontal cortex, which are disturbed in disorders like schizophrenia and autism.”

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 2589 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER We’ve all heard the story of the third Little Pig, who foiled the hyperventilating wolf by building his house out of bricks, rather than with straw or sticks as his brothers had done. Less commonly known is that the pig later improved his home’s safety profile by installing convex security mirrors at key points along the driveway. Well, why not? In the current issue of Animal Behaviour, researchers present evidence that domestic pigs can quickly learn how mirrors work and will use their understanding of reflected images to scope out their surroundings and find their food. The researchers cannot yet say whether the animals realize that the eyes in the mirror are their own, or whether pigs might rank with apes, dolphins and other species that have passed the famed “mirror self-recognition test” thought to be a marker of self-awareness and advanced intelligence. To which I say, big squeal. Why should the pigs waste precious mirror time inspecting their teeth or straightening the hairs on their chinny-chin-chins, when they could be using the mirror as a tool to find a far prettier sight, the pig heaven that comes in a bowl? The finding is just one in a series of recent discoveries from the nascent study of pig cognition. Other researchers have found that pigs are brilliant at remembering where food stores are cached and how big each stash is relative to the rest. They’ve shown that Pig A can almost instantly learn to follow Pig B when the second pig shows signs of knowing where good food is stored, and that Pig B will try to deceive the pursuing pig and throw it off the trail so that Pig B can hog its food in peace. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 13449 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jack Penland The idea of giving your brain a workout isn’t a new one, but the stumbling block has been to find a way to train your brain that actually shows improvement in other, unrelated mental tasks. Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, post-doctoral fellows at the University of Michigan, have been putting volunteers through an intense computer-based mental workout that is showing promise. Jaeggi says they gave the volunteers basic intelligence tests both before and after the training and found that, “After training … people actually got smarter in these (intelligence) tests.” She says, “In other training programs that are on the market, people get (better at a) particular task, so they form very task-specific strategies." However, she adds, “Their ability does not transfer to domains other than the training task, itself.” For example, she says, people have been able to train themselves to remember long sequences of numbers, but if the sequence changes to letters or shapes, people have to start over and re-train with the new material. ©2009 ScienCentral

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 12402 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Long thought the province of the abstract, cognition may actually evolve as physical experiences and actions ignite mental life With gargantuan ears, gleaming brown eyes, a fuzzy white muzzle and a squat, furry body, Leonardo looks like a magical creature from a Harry Potter book. He’s actually a robot powered by an innovative set of silicon innards. Like a typical 6-year-old child, but unlike standard robots that come preprogrammed with inflexible rules for thinking, Leonardo adopts the perspectives of people he meets and then acts on that knowledge. Leonardo’s creators, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Personal Robots Group and special effects aces at the Stan Winston Studio in Van Nuys, Calif., watch their inquisitive invention make social strides with a kind of parental pride. Consider this humanlike attainment. Leo, as he’s called for short, uses sensors to watch MIT researcher Matt Berlin stash cookies in one of two boxes with hinged, open covers. After Berlin leaves the room, another experimenter enters and creeps over to the boxes, a hood obscuring his face. The mysterious intruder moves the cookies from one box to the other and closes both containers before skulking out. Only Leo can unlock the boxes, by pressing buttons on a panel placed in front of him. Berlin soon returns and vainly tries to open the original cookie box. He asks Leo to unlock it for him. The robot shifts his gaze from one box to the other, his mental wheels seemingly turning. Then Leo unlocks the second box. The robot has correctly predicted that Berlin wants the cookies that were put in the first box, and that Berlin doesn’t realize that someone moved those cookies to the other box. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 12140 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Count on evolution to play favorites. When it comes to math achievement, some kids may start out with an inherent advantage. A portion of 14-year-olds deftly estimate approximate quantities of items without counting, whereas others do so with either moderate or limited success, a new study finds. The ability is evolutionarily ancient and cannot be taught, but tends to get better with age. Large variations in this number sense closely parallel youngsters’ mathematics achievement scores from kindergarten to sixth grade, concludes a team reporting in the Sept. 7 Nature and led by psychologist Justin Halberda of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Earlier studies indicated that a faculty for rapidly estimating approximate quantities appears by age 4 months, long before any math instruction. How precisely a child can estimate amounts may influence math learning and achievement, Halberda proposes. He and his colleagues are now assessing this ability in 3-year-olds whose math achievement in elementary school will be tracked. It’s also possible that high-quality or intensive math instruction may increase the accuracy of a person’s number estimates. Halberda suspects that if such effects exist, they’re relatively small. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12020 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER As the candidates have shown us in the succulent telenovela that is the 2008 presidential race, there are many ways to parry for political power. You can go tough and steely in an orange hunter’s jacket, or touchy-feely with a Kleenex packet. You can ally yourself with an alpha male like Chuck Norris, befriend an alpha female like Oprah Winfrey or split the difference and campaign with your mother. You can seek the measured endorsement of the town elders or the restless energy of the young, showily handle strange infants or furtively slam your opponents. Just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians. Researchers who study highly gregarious and relatively brainy species like rhesus monkeys, baboons, dolphins, sperm whales, elephants and wolves have lately uncovered evidence that the creatures engage in extraordinarily sophisticated forms of politicking, often across large and far-flung social networks. Male dolphins, for example, organize themselves into at least three nested tiers of friends and accomplices, said Richard C. Connor of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, rather like the way human societies are constructed of small kin groups allied into larger tribes allied into still larger nation-states. The dolphins maintain their alliances through elaborately synchronized twists, leaps and spins like Blue Angel pilots blazing their acrobatic fraternity on high. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 11228 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY AT times, adult life can feel like an extended exercise in escaping high school, a scramble to shed wallflower memories, to show all those snickering swells what happens when a worm grows wings or a spine (or a hedge fund). A study released a little over a week ago, which found that eldest children end up, on average, with slightly higher I.Q.’s than younger siblings, was a reminder that the fight for self-definition starts much earlier than freshman year. Families, whatever the relative intelligence of their members, often treat the firstborn as if he or she were the most academic, and the younger siblings fill in other niches: the wild one, the flirt. These imposed caricatures, in combination with the other labels that accumulate from the sandbox through adolescence, can seem over time like a miserable entourage of identities that can be silenced only with hours of therapy. But there’s another way to see these alternate identities: as challenges that can sharpen psychological skills. In a country where reinvention is considered a birthright, many people seem to treat old identities the way Houdini treated padlocked boxes: something to wriggle free from, before being dragged down. And psychological research suggests that this ability can be a sign of mental resilience, of taking control of your own story rather than being trapped by it. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10446 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Amazonian ants rig up gruesome traps to snare prey before stinging them to death and carving them up to eat, a new study reveals. Allomerus decemarticulatus is a tiny tree-dwelling ant which lives in the forests of the northern Amazon. Researchers examining the relationship between different ant species and their host plants noticed that this particular ant lived on only one plant - Hirtella physophora - and that they built galleries hanging under its stems. Many ant species build these galleries as hideouts to act as sanctuaries between their nests and foraging areas. But the team, led by Jérôme Orivel at the University of Toulouse, France, spotted that A. decemarticulatus were using these galleries as traps for prey. The traps are woven together using hairs stripped from the ants’ host plant and reinforced with fungus, producing a platform with pitted holes. “The ants are always hiding just under the holes, waiting with their mandibles open. When an insect arrives they immediately grab the legs and antennae,” says Orivel. This pulling immobilises the victim, stretching it out as though being tortured on a mediaeval rack. Worker ants then clamber over their helpless prey, biting and stinging until the victim is paralysed or dead. The carcass is then chopped into small pieces while still on the rack or, more likely, carried back to the leaf pouch where the ants nest to be devoured. The surprise-attack traps are “like something out of Edgar Allan Poe”, says Mike Kaspari, an ant expert at the University of Oklahoma, US. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 7224 - Posted: 06.24.2010

General human intelligence appears to be based on the volume of gray matter tissue in certain regions of the brain, UC Irvine College of Medicine researchers have found in the most comprehensive structural brain-scan study of intelligence to date. The study also discovered that because these regions related to intelligence are located throughout the brain, a single “intelligence center,” such as the frontal lobe, is unlikely. Dr. Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and long-time human intelligence researcher, and colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico used MRI to obtain structural images of the brain in 47 normal adults who also took standard intelligence quotient tests. The researchers used a technique called voxel-based morphometry to determine gray matter volume throughout the brain which they correlated to IQ scores. Study results appear on the online version of NeuroImage. Previous research had shown that larger brains are weakly related to higher IQ, but this study is the first to demonstrate that gray matter in specific regions in the brain is more related to IQ than is overall size. Multiple brain areas are related to IQ, the UCI and UNM researchers have found, and various combinations of these areas can similarly account for IQ scores. Therefore, it is likely that a person’s mental strengths and weaknesses depend in large part on the individual pattern of gray matter across his or her brain. © Copyright 2002-2004 UC Regents

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
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Link ID: 5844 - Posted: 06.24.2010

(Kingston, ON) -- New research from investigators in the Centre for Neuroscience Studies at Queen’s University and the Centre for Brain and Mind at The University of Western Ontario has provided the first neuro-imaging evidence that the brain's frontal lobes play a critical role in planning and choosing actions. Their study is published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The research team has found that a small region in the frontal lobe of the human brain is selectively activated when an individual intends to make a particular action and not another. These findings help explain why individuals with frontal lobe damage sometimes act impulsively and often have problems making decisions.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 2940 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nora Schultz New Caledonian crows, famed for their tool-making skills, can also use tools to manipulate other tools. Such “metatool” use shows that the crows have the brainpower to apply their skills to a completely new situation and plan ahead to solve a task, researchers believe. Working with captured wild crows, Russell Gray and his team from the University of Auckland in New Zealand hid a treat in a box so that a crow could only extract it with the help of a long stick. This kind of task is easy for the tool-using crows. But then the researchers added a twist by placing the long stick in a cage, out of the crows' reach. No problem: the birds used a second, shorter stick, to get the first one, then took it back to the box to get the food. “Six out of seven crows tried straight away to use the short stick to get to the long tool. There was no trial and error,” says Gray. Metatool use is normally only seen in humans and apes. Even monkeys struggle in similar experiments. This is thought to be due to the cognitive complexity of the task, which requires using a tool on an intermediate object in a novel context before tackling the real goal, which is to extract the food. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 0: ; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 10606 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Intelligence may lead to a better paid job and quality of life but, in old age, cleverness has no effect on happiness, new research suggests. A happy old age is what many people spend their lives preparing for, aiming for financial security and good health in their dotage. But one thing people need not worry about, it seems, is how clever they are. A study of more than 400 pensioners reveals that cognitive ability is unrelated to happiness in old age. The Scottish research looked at a group of 416 people born in 1921, who underwent intelligence tests at the ages of 11 and 79. At the age of 80, the group was also sent a “satisfaction with life” questionnaire, which had them assess their current level of happiness. “We found no association between levels of mental ability and reported happiness, which is quite surprising because intelligence is highly valued in our society,” says Alan Gow, who carried out the research with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Participants were asked to respond to five statements about their happiness and give a rating on a scale of 1 to 7 according to how strongly they agreed. The statements referred mainly to their current life, but also asked if, given the chance, they would like to have done anything differently with their lives. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 7649 - Posted: 06.24.2010

While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence. The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance. “These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and longtime human intelligence researcher, who led the study with colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico. “In addition, by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain.” Study results appear on the online version of NeuroImage. © Copyright 2002-2005 UC Regents

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
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Link ID: 6729 - Posted: 06.24.2010