From a theoretical perspective, most discussions of statistical learning have focused on the possible “statistical” properties that are the object of learning. Much less attention has been given to defining what “learning” is in the context of “statistical learning.” One major difficulty is that SL research has been monitoring participants’ performance in laboratory settings with a strikingly narrow set of tasks, where learning is typically assessed offline, through a set of two-alternative-forced-choice questions, which follow a brief visual or auditory familiarization (...) stream. Is that all there is to characterizing SL abilities? Here we adopt a novel perspective for investigating the processing of regularities in the visual modality. By tracking online performance in a self-paced SL paradigm, we focus on the trajectory of learning. In a set of three experiments we show that this paradigm provides a reliable and valid signature of SL performance, and it offers important insights for understanding how statistical regularities are perceived and assimilated in the visual modality. This demonstrates the promise of integrating different operational measures to our theory of SL. (shrink)

In order to extract the regularities underlying a continuous sensory input, the individual elements constituting the stream have to be encoded and their transitional probabilities (TPs) should be learned. This suggests that variance in statistical learning (SL) performance reflects efficiency in encoding representations as well as efficiency in detecting their statistical properties. These processes have been taken to be independent and temporally modular, where first, elements in the stream are encoded into internal representations, and then the co‐occurrences between them are (...) computed and registered. Here, we entertain a novel hypothesis that one unifying construct—the rate of information in the sensory input—explains learning performance. This theoretical approach merges processes related to encoding of events and those related to learning their regularities into a single computational principle. We present data from two large‐scale experiments with over 800 participants tested in support for this hypothesis, showing that rate of information in a visual stream clearly predicts SL performance, and that similar rate of information values leads to similar SL performance. We discuss the implications for SL theory and its relation to regularity learning. (shrink)

One of the themes that has been widely addressed in both the implicit learning and statistical learning literatures is that of rule learning. While it is widely agreed that the extraction of regularities from the environment is a fundamental facet of cognition, there is still debate about the nature of rule learning. Rey and colleagues show that the comparison between human and non‐human primates can contribute important insights to this debate.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed‐false claims, for instance by merely conversationally (...) implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed‐false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment‐based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment. (shrink)

This article asks how the application of digital technologies is changing the organization of the agri-food system in the context of the third food regime. The academic debate on digitalization and food largely focuses on the input and farm level. Yet, based on the analysis of 280 digital services and products, we show that digital technologies are now being used along the entire food commodity chain. We argue that digital technologies in the third food regime serve on the one hand (...) as a continuation of established information and communication technologies, thus deepening certain features of the existing food regime such as the retail sector’s control over global commodity chains. On the other hand, digital technologies also introduce new forms of control and value extraction based on the use of data and pave the way for large tech companies to take over market shares in the agri-food sector. Finally, we find that multinational agri-food companies are starting to take on the business models of leading digital tech companies, for instance by developing digital platforms throughout the agri-food system. We argue that this shows that the broader economic restructuring of neoliberal capitalism towards digital capitalism is also making its way into the agri-food system. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

ABSTRACTThe principle of informed refusal poses a specific problem when it is invoked by a pregnant woman who, in spite of having accepted her pregnancy, refuses the diagnostic and/or therapeutic measures that would ensure the well‐being of her endangered fetus. Guidelines issued by professional bodies in the developed world are conflicting: either they allow autonomy and informed consent to be overruled to the benefit of the fetus, or they recommend the full respect of these principles. A number of medical ethicists (...) advocate the overruling of alleged irrational or unreasonable refusal for the benefit of the fetus. The present essay supports the view of fetal rights to health and to life based on the principle that an ‘accepted’ fetus is a ‘third person’. In developing countries, however, the implementation of the latter principle is likely to be in conflict with a ‘communitarian’ perception of the individual – in this case, the pregnant woman. Within the scope of the limitations to the right to autonomy of J.S. Mill's ‘harm principle’, the South African Patients’ Charter makes provision for informed refusal. The fact that, in practice, it is not implemented illustrates the well‐known difficulty of applying Western bioethical principles in real life in the developing world. (shrink)

Given instances of widespread citizen cooperation with political regimes widely perceived as illegitimate, why are some individuals subsequently branded as collaborators who had engaged in “treasonous cooperation” with the enemy whereas others who had been involved in similar or identical forms of cooperation were not? Using the branding and punishment of Nazi collaborators in the postwar Polish criminal court system as a case study, this article excavates how the perceived betrayals undergirding the social construction of collaboration are shaped by the (...) interaction of macro- and micro-level bonds associated with membership in national and local communities. This analysis highlights how highly localized perceptions of betrayal, manifested as individual grievances, became intertwined with larger understandings of loyalty to the nation, thereby selecting who was eligible for membership in the postwar political and social order. In addition to laying the groundwork for a sociological theory of collaboration, this study also contributes to a growing body of scholarship dedicated to “everyday nationhood.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Layers of Seeing and Seeing through Layers: The Work of Art in the Age of Digital ImageryLouisa Wood Ruby (bio)Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the (...) time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership.—Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936In consulting on or creating a Web site designed to use works of art for teaching purposes, it is extremely important to be aware of the differences between seeing an artwork “in the flesh” and in reproduction. Museum educators are highly aware of this disparity and are therefore eager to have students visit museums to experience authentic works of art instead of seeing them only in books, slides, or on Web sites. Already in 1936, Walter Benjamin called attention to the drawbacks of reproductions; his words resonate all the more in our age of digital image overload. Easy access to images is, of course, desirable, and the advanced technologies we now have can even aid our understanding of a work of art. Nonetheless, the physical experience of standing in front of a work of art can never be replicated by seeing it on a flat screen or a piece of paper. In this article I will examine the advantages, disadvantages, differences, and similarities between looking at a Web-based image of a Rembrandt painting, a photograph of a Rembrandt painting, and actually standing in front of one of his original works. I will also discuss the more advanced technologies for examining paintings and how they can help us “see” further into a work of art and increase our understanding of it. [End Page 51]When standing in front of a painting, you are seeing a three-dimensional object with a history of its own. Its nicks, the dings in its frame, its true colors and texture, its exact size, the quality of the brushstrokes, and the amount of paint are all visible to the careful observer, who stands in a long line of viewers over the centuries who have appreciated the artist’s achievement. When approached from different angles, a painting in real space can even seem to vary in the mood it conveys or the impression it gives. A striking demonstration of this phenomenon occurred during a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when Rika Burnham, a museum educator, divided our Rembrandt Project group in half and asked us to look at Rembrandt’s 1660 Self-Portrait from different angles and describe the sitter’s mood. When we compared notes, our impressions of the painting were so different that an outside listener would have thought we were looking at two completely different paintings. We then switched angles, and our respective impressions changed dramatically. Effects of light (shadows, highlights, color) and interpretations of elements in the painting, such as the hand or the hat, had been affected by the angle from which we had approached the work, and these minor adjustments had significantly altered the way we “read” the painting.This kind of experience is of course not possible when looking at a photograph of a work of art. A photograph can be very useful and can usually tell you much about a painting, but, unfortunately, the photograph itself is an object that was taken at a specific time and place, under specific circumstances that might or might not be ideal for capturing the essence of what it is trying to reproduce. Because the angle from which a photograph is taken remains static, it only allows us to experience the painting from one direction, under the given set of lighting conditions. Other problems abound. Two color reproductions of a given painting will more than likely offer wildly different color tonalities because photographs and reproductions in many publications imperfectly correct for color. Lighting of the painting may... (shrink)

Louisa Shea explores modernity's debt to Cynicism by examining the works of thinkers who turned to the ancient Cynics as a model for reinventing philosophy and ...

The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to _say_ something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies (...) have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample of _N_ = 255 participants from Russia and _N_ = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agent _saying_ something they believe to be false. (shrink)

Résumé Le discours sur la traduction s’est essentiellement montré picturaliste, faisant usage de métaphores telles que la copie ou le travestissement, qui inscrivent l’acte de traduire dans une logique de la transparence dont les conséquences sont désastreuses. La transparence commande, en particulier, l’effacement du traducteur auquel toute subjectivité est déniée. Mais une voie existe pour rompre la chaîne qui relie la transparence à l’effacement en passant par l’illusion ; se détourner de l’image, du figurable, et porter son attention sur le (...) pan souvent oublié de l’acte de traduction – le versant sonore des choses, l’écoute – apparaît comme un cheminement beaucoup plus fructueux. (shrink)

David Rothenberg, a philosophy professor and Jazz musician, has been improvising with nonhuman animals for years, among his playing partners are birds and whales, known to be territorial animals. As Deleuze and Guattari propose that the origin of art is precisely the territorialising animal and more a function of nature than a specifically human cultural achievement, their concept of territory and rhythm offers a non-anthropocentric way of looking at these encounters. Rothenberg’s sonic experiments in resonance and interspecies interaction do not (...) rely on language, thus I argue that the human and the nonhuman animals form a temporary joint territory via sonic rhythms and engage in a mutual becoming by forming a rhizome. His sound thinking practice thus also helps in decentralising further anthropocentric models of music and art. (shrink)

A citizen’s jury brings together a mix of citizens from different socio-economic groups who deliberate on a particular policy issue over a number of days. Since their development in the 1970s in th...

The South African Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act 92 of 1996 gives women the right to voluntary abortion on request. The reality factor, however, is that five years later there are still more ‘technically illegal’ abortions than legal ones. Amongst other factors, one of the main obstacles to access to this constitutionally enshrined human right is the right to conscientious objection/refusal. Although the right to conscientious objection is also a basic human right, the case of refusal to provide abortion (...) services on conscientious objection grounds should not be seen as absolute and inalienable, at least in the developing world. In the developed world, where referral to another service provider is for the most part accessible, a conscientious objector to abortion does not really put the abortion seeker’s life at risk. The same cannot be said in developing countries even when abortion is decriminalised. This is because referral procedures are fraught with major obstacles. Therefore, it is argued that the right to conscientious objection to abortion should be limited by the circumstances in which the request for abortion arises. (shrink)

The South African Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act 92 of 1996 gives women the right to voluntary abortion on request. The reality factor, however, is that five years later there are still more ‘technically illegal’ abortions than legal ones. Amongst other factors, one of the main obstacles to access to this constitutionally enshrined human right is the right to conscientious objection/refusal. Although the right to conscientious objection is also a basic human right, the case of refusal to provide abortion (...) services on conscientious objection grounds should not be seen as absolute and inalienable, at least in the developing world. In the developed world, where referral to another service provider is for the most part accessible, a conscientious objector to abortion does not really put the abortion seeker’s life at risk. The same cannot be said in developing countries even when abortion is decriminalised. This is because referral procedures are fraught with major obstacles. Therefore, it is argued that the right to conscientious objection to abortion should be limited by the circumstances in which the request for abortion arises. (shrink)

This artists’ text examines the relationship between photographic images and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environments. We note that such scripted image worlds necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of the capacities of image, its formation, reproduction, storage and circulation. As an archaeologist would document an excavation, extending conventional methods through 3D visualization technology to work in new ways with the archaeological record, we chose to document a world built and razed digitally by a now dormant group of anonymous gamers called the Yung (...) Cum Bois (YCBs). We turn to some definitions of griefer as a subcultural phenomenon within online culture to attempt to contextualize our involvement some more, thinking through the forms of image-gathering that grief play has generated, such as scripted object attacks where image-objects spawn and self-replicate, continually spurting out copies of themselves, lagging the region, slowing down frame rates, consuming land resources. Here we witness images blockading network logistics. This was active fieldwork. We got involved. We applied visualization technology learnt from archaeological computing research to the avatars, temporary structures and abandoned ruins of an online world, Second Life (SL). We patched together a kind of virtual photogrammetry, enabling the monumentalization of avatars, objects and scenarios, recompiling these into new configurations and uploading them freely to be reused, detourned and weaponized by our virtual friends. We situate this endeavour within a cobbled history of imaging technology, the networked self and its pathologies, riffling through our own image dump. Here. (shrink)

Von Hippel & Trivers reason that the potential benefits of successfully deceiving others provide a basis for the evolution of self-deception. However, as self-deceptive processes themselves provide considerable adaptive value to an individual, self-deception may have evolved as an end in itself, rather than as the means to an end of improving other-deception.

The important text of the inscription found at Vetren, in effect the oldest document from the chancellery of the Odrysian kingdom, represents a revision - adapted to the political realities of the middle of the 4th century BC - of the royal charter, which laid down, probably from its first foundation in around the middle of the 5th century BC, the legal status and the conditions of symbiosis of a Greek emporion in the sovereign territory of the Odrysian kingdom. It (...) was a convention guaranteeing the asylum of the emporion and the emporites established in Pistiros, confirming their financial transactions with the indigenous population and according extraordinary privileges to transient merchants originating from important commercial centres on the northern coast of the Aegean sea and the Black Sea. It also attests the existence of a system of conventions regulating the rights and privileges of the Greeks on Odrysian soil, similar, we imagine, to that which according to Herodotus' account of Naucratis, regulated the presence and trade of Greeks in Pharaonic Egypt. (shrink)

This article focuses on the experiences of social care workers during the first wave of the Covid pandemic. The method involved analyzing diaries kept by 65 professionals in 8 French regions during the first lockdown in France in the spring of 2020. As a form of non-binding, narrative expression, keeping diaries breaks with traditional models of reporting common in social care structures and allowed professionals to reflect on the experience as it was lived. In the diaries, professionals explored how the (...) crisis disrupted and challenged their personal and professional values but also allowed innovation in care practices for vulnerable populations that will continue beyond the pandemic period. Five care values were put to forefront by professionals: (1) spontaneity/flexibility; (2) respect for persons; (3) team reflexivity; (4) innovation; (5) solidarity. Mobilizing philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s ideas on recognition, Payet and Laforgue’s analysis of weak actors, as well as research on moral distress, we discuss how these values were tested during the crisis and what effect they had on professionals’ and users’ vulnerabilities. We will also elaborate the interest of keeping account of social care work through narrative methods. (shrink)

ObjectiveMisophonia is an unusually strong aversion to a specific class of sounds – most often human bodily sounds such as chewing, crunching, or breathing. A number of studies have emerged in the last 10 years examining misophonia in adults, but little is known about the impact of the condition in children. Here we set out to investigate the well-being profile of children with misophonia, while also presenting the first validated misophonia questionnaire for children.Materials and MethodsWe screened 142 children using our (...) novel diagnostic [the Sussex Misophonia Scale for Adolescents ]. This allowed us to identify a group of children already manifesting misophonia at that age – the first population-sampled cohort of child misophonics examined to date. Children and their parents also completed measures of well-being and creative self-construct.ResultsData show that children with misophonia have significantly elevated levels of anxiety and obsessive compulsive traits. Additionally children with misophonia have significantly poorer life-satisfaction, and health-related quality of life. As predicted, they show no differences in creative self-construct.ConclusionTogether our data suggest the first evidence in population sampling of poorer life outcomes for children with misophonia, and provide preliminary convergent and discriminant validation for our novel misophonia instrument. Our data suggest a need for greater recognition and therapeutic outlets for adolescents with misophonia. (shrink)

Hesitations about accepting whole-heartedly Norris et al.'s suggestion to abandon feedback in speech processing models concern (1) whether accounting for all available data justifies additional layers of complexity in the model and (2) whether characterizing Merge as non- interactive is valid. Spoken word recognition studies support the nature of Merge's lexical level and suggest that phonemes should comprise the prelexical level.

The dominant discourse in chronic disease management centres on the ideal of person-centred healthcare, with an empowered patient taking an active role in decision-making with their healthcare provider. Despite these encouraging developments toward healthcare democracy, many person-centred conceptions of healthcare and programming continue to focus on the healthcare institution’s perspective and priorities. In these debates, the patient’s voice has largely been absent. This article takes the example of patient empowerment to show how the concept has been influenced by a variety (...) of competing and shifting influences that have led to conceptualisations and programming designed for the patient, but developed without the patient. The framework of epistemic injustice is proposed to unravel the complexity of these omissions. The concept can be defined as a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. It occurs when a person is ignored or not believed due to a prejudice of some kind. It has been applied to healthcare in order to better understand barriers for patient participation and will be used to better understand the problems with current empowerment definitions and implementation strategies. The article will end by proposing some methodologies to facilitate patient-developed concepts of empowerment. (shrink)

Habitat fragmentation produces isolated patches characterized by increased edge effects from an originally continuous habitat. The shapes of these patches often show a high degree of irregularity: their shapes deviate significantly from regular geometrical shapes such as rectangular and elliptical ones. In fractal theory, the geometry of patches created by a common landscape transformation process should be statistically similar, i.e. their fractal dimensions and their form factors should be equal. In this paper, we analyze 49 woodlot fragments (Pinus sylvestris L.) (...) in the Belgian Kempen region to study the direct relationship between a transformation process and the concomitant patch geometry. Although the fractal dimension of the woodlots is scattered (i.e. they are not statistically similar), the perimeter-area relation of the fragments is characterized by a single, ‘dimension-like’ exponent. This exponent suggests a certain shape homogeneity among the patches, which is confirmed by the absence of hierarchical levels associated with sharp increases of the fractal dimension at scale transitions. The interaction of different natural (soil factor, vegetation type) and anthropogenic (afforestation, urbanization) processes during patch development is assumed to have generated this feature. Comparison of the area and perimeter fractal dimension with an ecological index for habitat quality, the interior-to-edge ratio, shows that the fractal dimension is suitable for predicting interior habitat presence, which is more likely for patches with smooth perimeters and compact areas. The ratio of the area to the perimeter fractal dimension confirms this observation, with high values for high interior-to-edge ratios, characteristic for regularly shaped patches. (shrink)

Ensuring patient participation in healthcare decision making remains a difficult task. Factors such as a lack of time in the consultation, medical objectivation, or the difficulties of translating individual patient experience into the treatment plan have been shown to limit patient contributions. Little research attention has focused however on how emotions experienced by both the patient and the healthcare provider may affect the ability of the patient to participate. In this research, patient’s and healthcare provider’s emotions were identified and analysed. (...) The research method showed fear as a prominent emotion experienced. This included patient’s fears both inside and outside the consultation, as well as the healthcare provider’s fears in their professional practice. Using Martha Nussbaum’s cognitive-evaluative theory of emotions as an additional means of analysis, the research looked at what this emotion could show about the importance of the object of this fear to the person’s eudaimonia (flourishing). At the end of the article, several solutions were proposed to help mitigate this fear to keep it from becoming a destructive force in the healthcare provider—patient relationship. (shrink)

Review of Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio. 2015. Biological autonomy: a philosophical and theoretical enquiry.