Research on the relation between sound and meaning in language has reported substantial evidence for implicit associations between articulatory–acoustic characteristics of phonemes and emotions. In the present study, we specifically tested the relation between the acoustic properties of a text and its emotional tone as perceived by readers. To this end, we asked participants to assess the emotional tone of single stanzas extracted from a large variety of poems. The selected stanzas had either an extremely high, a neutral, or (...) an extremely low average formant dispersion. To assess the average formant dispersion per stanza, all words were phonetically transcribed and the distance between the first and second formant per vowel was calculated. Building on a long tradition of research on associations between sound frequency on the one hand and non‐acoustic concepts such as size, strength, or happiness on the other hand, we hypothesized that stanzas with an extremely high average formant dispersion would be rated lower on items referring to Potency (dominance) and higher on items referring to Activity (arousal) and Evaluation (emotional valence). The results confirmed our hypotheses for the dimensions of Potency and Evaluation, but not for the dimension of Activity. We conclude that, at least in poetic language, extreme values of acoustic features of vowels are a significant predictor for the emotional tone of a text. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In (...) a series of IAT studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception. (shrink)

Cross-modal perceptual illusions occur when a stimulus to one modality impacts perceptual experience associated with another modality. Unlike synaesthesia, cross-modal illusions are intelligible as results of perceptual strategies for dealing with sensory stimulation to multiple modalities, rather than as mere quirks. I argue that understanding cross-modal illusions reveals an important flaw in a widespread conception of the senses, and of their role in perceptual experience, according to which understanding perception and perceptual experience is a (...) matter of assembling independently viable stories about vision, audition, olfaction, and the rest. (shrink)

Experiencing a stimulus in one sensory modality is often associated with an experience in another sensory modality. For instance, seeing a lemon might produce a sensation of sourness. This might indicate some kind of cross-modal correspondence between vision and gustation. The aim of the current study was to provide explore whether such cross-modal correspondences influence cross-modal integration during perceptual learning. To that end, we conducted 2 experiments. Using a speeded classification task, Experiment 1 established (...) a cross-modal correspondence between visual lightness and the frequency of an auditory tone. Using a short-term priming procedure, Experiment 2 showed that manipulation of such cross-modal correspondences led to the creation of a crossmodal unit regardless of the nature of the correspondence (i.e., congruent, Experiment 2a or incongruent, Experiment 2b). However, a comparison of priming-effects sizes suggested that cross-modal correspondences modulate cross-modal integration during learning and thus leading to new learned units that have different stability over time. We discuss the implications of our results for the relation between cross-modal correspondence and perceptual learning in the context of a Bayesian explanation of cross-modal correspondences. (shrink)

The article explores cross-modal iconic relations in nine diverse Western-music songs ranging from 1600 to 2015, all of them thematizing dysphoric weeping. Initial input comes from five recurrent features observed in ancient Greek texts associated with performative events, including the prominence of sound, interjections and strong self-referentiality, repetitions and refrains, the motif of endlessness, and tears associated with streams of water, dew, and libation liquids. The analysis adopts Peirce’s conceptual distinction between image, diagram, and metaphor iconicity, although the (...) continuum reading proposed by several scholars is ultimately favored. The sample turns out to offer plenty of evidence of iconic relations. Interjections, falsetto, verbal repetitions, musical repetitions, musical rendering of sighs and endlessness, ostinato patterns, downward notes, and water images (rain and rivers), all of this is shown to substantiate cross-modal iconicity encompassing weeping, lyrics, music (including musical notation), and images, in different combinations. Quantitative investigations confirming/disconfirming and adding iconicity patterns, and comparative analyses linking Western and non-Western lament traditions constitute desiderata for future work. (shrink)

Maintaining and coordinating multiple task-sets is difficult and leads to costs, however task-switching training can reduce these deficits. A recent study in young adults demonstrated that this training effect occurs at an amodal processing level. Old age is associated with reduced cognitive plasticity and further increases the performance costs when mixing multiple tasks. Thus, cognitive aging might be a limiting factor for inducing cross-modal training effects in a task-switching environment. We trained participants, aged 62–83 years, with an auditory (...) task-switching paradigm over four sessions, to investigate whether training-related reductions in task-switching costs would also manifest in an untrained visual modality version of the task. Two control groups trained with single tasks or not trained allowed us to identify improvements specific to task-switching training. To make statistical evaluations of any age differences in training and cross-modal transfer, the data from the Kattner cohort were incorporated into the present analysis. Despite the tendency for older adults to respond more cautiously, task-switching training specifically led to a mixing cost reduction in both trained and untrained modalities, the magnitude of which was statistically similar regardless of age. In line with a growing body of research, we failed to observe any far transfer effects in measures of inhibition, working memory or fluid intelligence. Overall, we conclude that any apparent cognitive limitations associated with aging do not prevent cognitive control processes which support set-shifting from improving at an amodal level. (shrink)

Recent studies have provided evidence of associations between neurochemistry and reading (dis)ability (Pugh et al., 2014). Based on a long history of studies indicating that fluent reading entails the automatic convergence of the written and spoken forms of language and our recently proposed Neural Noise Hypothesis (Hancock et al., 2017), we hypothesized that individual differences in cross-modal integration would mediate, at least partially, the relationship between neurochemical concentrations and reading. Cross-modal integration was measured in 231 (...) children using a two-alternative forced choice cross-modal matching task with three language conditions (letters, words, and pseudowords) and two levels of difficulty within each language condition. Neurometabolite concentrations of Choline (Cho), Glutamate (Glu), gamma-Aminobutyric (GABA), and N- acetyl-aspartate (NAA) were then measured in a subset of this sample (n = 70) with Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS). A structural equation mediation model revealed that the effect of cross-modal word matching mediated the relationship between increased Glu (which has been proposed to be an index of neural noise) and poorer reading ability. In addition, the effect of cross-modal word matching fully mediated a relationship between increased Cho and poorer reading ability. Multilevel mixed effects models confirmed that lower Cho predicted faster cross-modal matching reaction time, specifically in the hard word condition. These Cho... (shrink)

The current work investigated whether differences in phonological overlap between the past- and present-tense forms of regular and irregular verbs can account for the graded neurophysiological effects of verb regularity observed in past-tense priming designs. Event-related potentials were recorded from 16 healthy participants who performed a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately preceded present-tense targets. To minimize intra-modal phonological priming effects, cross-modal presentation between auditory primes and visual targets was employed, and results were compared to a (...) companion intra-modal auditory study (Justus, T., Larsen, J., de Mornay Davies, P., Swick, D. (2008). Interpreting dissociations between regular and irregular past-tense morphology: evidence from event-related potentials. Cognitive, Affective, Behavioral Neuroscience, 8, 178–194.). For both regular and irregular verbs, faster response times and reduced N400 components were observed for present-tense forms when primed by the corresponding past-tense forms. Although behavioral facilitation was observed with a pseudopast phonological control condition, neither this condition nor an orthographic-phonological control produced significant N400 priming effects. Instead, these two types of priming were associated with a post-lexical anterior negativity (PLAN). Results are discussed with regard to dual- and single-system theories of inflectional morphology, as well as intra- and cross-modal prelexical priming. (shrink)

Restrictivists hold that visual experience only represents low-level properties such as shape, spatial location, motion, color, etc. Expansionists contend that visual experience also represents high-level properties such as being a pine tree. I outline a new approach to support expansionism called the conflict cross-modal argument. What I call the conflict cross-modal effects occur when at least two perceptual systems disagree about some property belonging to a common stimulus, and this disagreement causes a change in the representational (...) and phenomenal content of the perceptual experience associated with one, or both, modalities. The conflict cross-modal argument works by accepting that if a property figures in a conflict cross-modal effect, then prima facie that property is a strong common sensible between the two modalities, and vision and another modality disagree about a property that is high-level for vision. After outlining this argument, and showing how it overcomes two obstacles that face traditional methods employed to defend expansionism, I turn to the well known Mcgurk effect as a case where vision and audition disagree about phoneme properties in order to employ my argument for the conclusion that phoneme properties are represented in visual experience. The upshot is that since phoneme properties are high-level for vision, we have an argument supporting expansionism. (shrink)

Most everyday tasks involve multiple modalities, which raises the question of how the processing of these modalities is coordinated by the cognitive system. In this paper, we focus on the coordination of visual attention and linguistic processing during speaking. Previous research has shown that objects in a visual scene are fixated before they are mentioned, leading us to hypothesize that the scan pattern of a participant can be used to predict what he or she will say. We test this hypothesis (...) using a data set of cued scene descriptions of photo-realistic scenes. We demonstrate that similar scan patterns are correlated with similar sentences, within and between visual scenes; and that this correlation holds for three phases of the language production process (target identification, sentence planning, and speaking). We also present a simple algorithm that uses scan patterns to accurately predict associated sentences by utilizing similarity-based retrieval. (shrink)

In ‘Syntactical Treatments of Modality, with Corollaries on Reflexion Principles and Finite Axiomatizability’, Acta Philosophica Fennica16 (1963), 153–167, Richard Montague shows that the use of a single syntactic predicate (with a context-independent semantic value) to represent modalities of alethic necessity and idealized knowledge leads to inconsistency. In ‘A Note on Syntactical Treatments of Modality’, Synthese44 (1980), 391–395, Richmond Thomason obtains a similar impossibility result for idealized belief: under a syntactical treatment of belief, the assumption that idealized belief is deductively closed, (...) together with certain other plausible conditions on idealized belief, imply that an ideal believer with consistent beliefs cannot believe the truth of Robinson's Arithmetic. In this essay I show that an impossibility result similar to Thomason's can be obtained which does not assume that belief is deductively closed or ideal in any other way. (shrink)

Reductionists about dispositions must either say the natural properties are all dispositional or individuate properties hyperintensionally. Lewis stands in as an example of the sort of combination I think is incoherent: properties individuated by modal profile + categoricalism.

Attempts to capture the distinction between categorical and dispositional states in terms of more primitive modal notions – subjunctive conditionals, causal roles, or combinatorial principles – are bound to fail. Such failure is ensured by a deep symmetry in the ways dispositional and categorical states alike carry modal import. But the categorical/dispositional distinction should not be abandoned; it underpins important metaphysical disputes. Rather, it should be taken as a primitive, after which the doomed attempts at reductive explanation can (...) be transformed into circular but interesting accounts. (shrink)

Discrepancies between an agent's goals and beliefs play an important, if implicit, role in determining what a rational agent is motivated to do. This is most obvious in cases where an agent achieves a complex goal incrementally and must deliberate anew as each milestone is reached. In such cases the concept of goal/belief discrepancy defines an appropriate space to which a degree-of-achievement yardstick can be applied. This paper presents soundness and completeness results concerning a logic for reasoning about goal/belief discrepancy, (...) and it is suggested that a certain species of goal/belief discrepancy captures the concept of desire. (shrink)

A selection function based semantics is offered for the 'can' of ability based on the idea that 'John can run a four minute mile' is true iff John would do so under the right conditions, meaning that he would do so under at least one appropriately chosen test condition. Completeness is proved for an axiom system and semantics based on this idea, and the logic turns out to be interestingly different from any standard system of modal logic.

The ‘consensus’ model of public reason, associated with John Rawls’s political liberalism, has been criticised for excluding certain reasons from receiving consideration where the justification of the constitutional essentials is concerned. One limitation of these criticisms is that they typically focus on the exclusion of reasons political liberals are committed to excluding, notably reasons based on religious and comprehensive views. I argue that public reason excludes some reasons, central to the interests of many oppressed groups, that public reason advocates will (...) agree should not be excluded.L’idée de raison publique comme «consensus», associée au libéralisme politique de John Rawls, a été attaquée du fait de sa supposée incapacité à permettre la prise en compte de certaines raisons dans les cas où la substance même de la constitution est en question. Une limitation de ces critiques est qu’elles se concentrent habituellement sur l’exclusion de ces raisons que les libéraux eux-mêmes s’efforcent d’exclure, en particulier des raisons fondées sur des vues globales ou religieuses. Je défends l’idée selon laquelle la raison publique exclut de fait certaines raisons, essentielles aux intérêts de nombreux groupes opprimés, que les tenants de la raison publique eux-mêmes considèreraient ne pas devoir être exclues. (shrink)

[IMPORTANT CORRECTION - See end of abstract.] In Syntactical Treatments of Modality, with Corollaries on Reflexion Principles and Finite Axiomatizability, Acta Philosophica Fennica 16 (1963), 153–167, Richard Montague shows that the use of a single syntactic predicate (with a context-independent semantic value) to represent modalities of alethic necessity and idealized knowledge leads to inconsistency. In A Note on Syntactical Treatments of Modality, Synthese 44 (1980), 391–395, Richmond Thomason obtains a similar impossibility result for idealized belief: under a syntactical treatment of (...) belief, the assumption that idealized belief is deductively closed, together with certain other plausible conditions on idealized belief, imply that an ideal believer with consistent beliefs cannot believe the truth of Robinson's Arithmetic. In this essay I assert an impossibility result similar to Thomason's but which does not assume that belief is deductively closed or ideal in any other way. There are technical mistakes in the formulations of Lemmas 1-4 and Theorem 2, however. Corrections can be found in the Erratum section of the author's website. (shrink)

I give a probabilistic semantics for modal logic in which modal operators function as quantifiers over Popper functions in probabilistic model sets, thereby generalizing Kripke's semantics for modal logic.

Most theorists of public reason, including both its proponents and critics, now accept that it is inconclusive, meaning that its correct application can result in a plurality of reasonable solutions to the issues it addresses. While some early critics argued that the inconclusiveness of public reason presented a serious problem for political legitimacy – a charge often associated with ‘the completeness objection’ – defenders of public reason have generally dismissed this objection on the grounds that political legitimacy does not hinge (...) on the selection of a singularly reasonable or most reasonable resolution to political disputes. We argue, however, that once the notion of political legitimacy accepted by prominent public reason theorists has been successfully disambiguated, the inconclusiveness of public reason is far more problematic than public reason theorists have acknowledged. (shrink)

This article highlights five areas of Scotus' philosophy that have recently been the subject of scholarly discussion. (1) Metaphysics : I outline the most current accounts of Scotus on individuation (thisness or haecceity) and the common nature. (2) Modal theory : I consider recent accounts both of Scotus' innovations in spelling out the notion of the logically (and broadly logically) possible, and of his account of the independence of modality. (3) Cognitive psychology : I examine recent views of Scotus' (...) theory of intentionality and the nature of mental content. (4) Semantics : I look at contemporary expositions of Scotus' view that words signify things. (5) Metaethics and ethics : I briefly describe conflicting interpretations of Scotus' metaethics, and discuss whether Scotus should be thought of as adopting some kind of divine-command theory or not. I note too Scotus' claim that virtues and passions can be located in the will. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Four-Dimensionalism and Identity Across Time: Henry of Ghent vs. BonaventureRichard CrossModern accounts of the identity of an object across time tend to fall roughly into two basic types.Let us say that something persists ıff, somehow or other, it exists at various times; this is the neutral word. Something perdures iff it persists by having different temporal parts, or stages, at different times, though no one part of it is (...) wholly present at more than one time; whereas it endures iff it persists by being wholly present at more than one time.1On the first of these analyses, but not the second, a persistent object includes temporal parts, and persistent material substances are thus on this analysis four-dimensional objects. On the first analysis, but not on the second, time-indices are explicable in terms of temporal parts. I shall take this as the basic difference between the two views.2Both views allow us to talk of temporal order and temporal direction. I [End Page 393] shall follow the medievals and talk about succession to capture both of these claims: “The notion of succession formally consists in the notion of ‘before’ and ‘after,’”3 and I take it that talk of “before” and “after” entails both order and direction.4 Medieval accounts of identity across time are, however, in some ways more obscure than the two modern ones just described. The medievals tend to associate all temporal succession with temporal extension: an object x has temporal succession if and only if x is temporally extended (and thus includes temporal parts).5 The medievals also (correctly, I believe) tend to suppose that substances—unlike (say) processes—do not have temporal parts.6 Thus, by the end of the thirteenth century the schoolmen commonly [End Page 394] distinguish permanent objects from successive objects. Permanent objects do not, and successive objects do, have temporal parts.7 Successive objects are processes; the class of permanent objects was generally held to include not only God, but also angels, material substances, and static accidents (i.e., accidents which do not entail any sort of process).8Given these claims, there is a problem to be faced in giving an account of the identity of, say, a material substance across time. But it is not the problem we would face. Our problem, post-Hume, is to explain the relevant (explanatory) continuity requirements for identity across time. The medievals’ problem is rather different. They do not need to specify general continuity requirements, because for them there is a very real sense in which substances—and indeed all permanent objects—lack temporal extension and, therefore, any sort of temporal succession at all. The problem for the medievals is thus to explain how substances can persist at all, rather than exist merely fleetingly.9In what follows, I will examine two thirteenth-century solutions to this problem. The first is a radical one: simply to deny the standard claim that substances lack temporal parts. This view will thus bear some resemblance to what we would label four-dimensionalism. The second solution I will examine represents one of the more successful attempts to defend the standard thirteenth-century line that substances lack temporal parts. This solution goes some way towards allowing succession (and time-indexing) without appealing to temporal parts.To understand the debate, we need to keep in mind that the medievals—following Aristotle—talk of the temporality of an object in terms of its being [End Page 395] measured by time. Confusingly, they might speak of a substance’s being measured in one sort of way, and its accidental properties’ being measured in another. Thus, by the end of the thirteenth century it was often claimed that the duration of a substance is measured not by time but by the aevum—the durational measure of objects lacking temporal parts—while some of a substance’s accidental properties could be measured by time. (I will explain in detail below how time and the aevum were understood.) On this view, the temporality of an object’s properties is not sufficient cause for positing the temporality of the object. There are acceptable and unacceptable ways of understanding... (shrink)

According to Henry of Ghent (d. 1293), it is impossible for the second person of the Trinity to assume into unity of person an irrational nature (e.g., a stone nature), or to assume a rational nature that does not enjoy the beatific vision. He argues that the assumption of a nature to a divine person entails both that the nature has the sort of powers that could exercise supernatural activities and that these powers are exercised. Henry’s Franciscan opponents argue against (...) this. Existent irrational natures (like existent rational natures) are not necessarily subsistent and belonging to a kind does not require the opportunity to exercise the causal powers associated with that kind. (shrink)

In ‘Two Spheres, Twenty Spheres, and the Identity of Indiscernibles,’ Della Rocca argues that any counterexample to the PII would involve ‘a brute fact of non-identity [. . .] not grounded in any qualitative difference.’ I respond that Adams's so-called Continuity Argument against the PII does not postulate qualitatively inexplicable brute facts of identity or non-identity if understood in the context of Kripkean modality. One upshot is that if the PII is understood to quantify over modal as well as (...) non-modal properties, the qualitative explicability of numerical distinctness requires not the PII but a principle of the identity of necessary indiscernibles. (shrink)

The chapter shows that Scotus defends the view that ‘God exists’ is both metaphysically and logically necessary. Thus, Scotus maintains that denying that God exists involves asserting a contradiction, and that this can be shown to be the case. But while Scotus believes that it can be shown that there is a concept in virtue of which ‘God exists’ is self-evident, he also believes that human beings in the current run of things can have no access to the content of (...) this concept. The chapter also relates the claims that God is both metaphysically and logically necessary to the kind of causally dependent modalities that Scotus employs in his attempt to prove God’s existence. (shrink)

“Additional needs children” is a term often used in the education system to describe children with school-based problems characterised by learning difficulties arising from academic, social and emotional stressors including, but not limited to, clinically diagnosed Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD). What has seldom been investigated is what biopsychosocial characteristics and other common comorbid behaviours are associated with academic learning difficulties. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between anxiety levels (Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale- Parent Report), autism traits (...) (Autism Spectrum Quotient – Child Version) and sleep quality (Sleep Disturbance Scale for Children) in ‘additional needs children’ with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Language Impairment or Mixed Diagnosis without an intellectual disability. The results demonstrated that the ASD group reported more impairments associated with comorbid anxiety and sleep compared to the other clinically diagnosed groups. Similarly, greater anxiety level was positively associated with a greater number of autism traits and poorer sleep quality regardless of diagnostic group. This suggests that higher anxiety symptoms are a core biomarker of children who often first come to their teacher’s attention with reading and learning difficulties (i.e. “additional needs”), irrespective of the primary cause of school-based problems. (shrink)

Ethnic-racial socialization serves as a protective factor in the development of minority children. However, few studies have focused on mixed-status Latinx families to include the broad expression of their ethnic-racial socialization practices centering on their immigration experiences as they teach their children the risks and restrictions of having undocumented status. These parents adapt their ERS in accordance with their experiences of stress, fear, and discrimination, all of which shape the type and frequency of their socialization messages. Through documentation status socialization, (...) Latinx parents forewarn their children of the inequities associated with their ethnic-racial group and undocumented status, including possible family separation. They also teach children about nativity differences and the attendant privilege of having documented status. This manuscript highlights insights to be gained by considering documentation status socialization as an ERS dimension within Latinx families. Learning about the specific ERS practices of such an understudied group is a social justice issue with important implications for understanding how these families might adapt and respond to their social context, especially amidst a political environment that engenders fear and isolation throughout their community. Including documentation status socialization in the ERS literature is a crucial step towards developing a deeper understanding of how the structural and social forces operating within the lives of undocumented immigrants impact normative family processes that ultimately exert an influence on their children’s development. A discussion on implications for practitioners and service providers working with this population is also included. (shrink)

‘Writing Pain’ argues that Anna Seward‘s Letters and Mary Robinson‘s letters create alternative models of sensibility from the suffering poet of Charlotte Smith‘s Elegiac Sonnets. Immensely popular, Smith‘s sonnets made feminine suffering a source of poetic agency by aestheticizing and privatizing it. However, despite their sincerity, her sonnets effaced the physical, nervous body of sensibility on which Seward‘s and Robinsons early poetic reputations had depended and for which they had been mocked. The popularity of Smith‘s model made it an important (...) model for women poets, but, by the end of the eighteenth century, sensibility was also associated with sickness and artifice. For Seward and Robinson, who wanted to build their literary reputations but were living with disabled bodies, Smiths example needed to be reimagined to account for the reciprocity of body and mind as they struggled to write through pain. (shrink)

Like any other group of philosophers, scholastic thinkers from the Middle Ages disagreed about even the most fundamental of concepts. With their characteristic style of rigorous semantic and logical analysis, they produced a wide variety of diverse theories about a huge number of topics. The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy offers readers an outstanding survey of many of these diverse theories, on a wide array of subjects. Its 35 chapters, all written exclusively for this Companion by leading international scholars, are (...) organized into seven parts: I Language and Logic II Metaphysics III Cosmology and Physics IV Psychology V Cognition VI Ethics and Moral Philosophy VII Political Philosophy In addition to shedding new light on the most well-known philosophical debates and problems of the medieval era, the Companion brings to the fore topics that may not traditionally be associated with scholastic philosophy, but were in fact a veritable part of the tradition. These include chapters covering scholastic theories about propositions, atomism, consciousness, and democracy and representation. The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy is a helpful, comprehensive introduction to the field for undergraduate students and other newcomers as well as a unique and valuable resource for researchers in all areas of philosophy. (shrink)

Throughout history, dance has maintained a critical presence across all human cultures, defying barriers of class, race, and status. How dance has synergistically co-evolved with humans has fueled a rich debate on the function of art and the essence of aesthetic experience, engaging numerous artists, historians, philosophers, and scientists. While dance shares many features with other art forms, one attribute unique to dance is that it is most commonly expressed with the human body. Because of this, social scientists and neuroscientists (...) are turning to dance and dancers to help answer questions of how the brain coordinates the body to perform complex, precise, and beautiful movements. In the present paper, we discuss how recent advances in neuroscientific methods provide the tools to advance our understanding of not only the cerebral phenomena associated with dance learning and observation but also the neural underpinnings of aesthetic appreciation associated with watching dance. We suggest that future work within the fields of dance neuroscience and neuroaesthetics have the potential to provide mutual benefits to both the scientific and artistic communities. (shrink)

This article highlights five areas of Scotus’ philosophy that have recently been the subject of scholarly discussion. (1) Metaphysics: I outline the most current accounts of Scotus on individuation (thisness or haecceity) and the common nature. (2) Modal theory: I consider recent accounts both of Scotus’ innovations in spelling out the notion of the logically (and broadly logically) possible, and of his account of the independence of modality. (3) Cognitive psychology: I examine recent views of Scotus’ theory of intentionality (...) and the nature of mental content. (4) Semantics: I look at contemporary expositions of Scotus’ view that words signify things. (5) Metaethics and ethics: I briefly describe conflicting interpretations of Scotus’ metaethics, and discuss whether Scotus should be thought of as adopting some kind of divine‐command theory or not. I note too Scotus’ claim that virtues and passions can be located in the will. (shrink)

Olivier Boulnois argues that a radical shift occurred in metaphysics at the end of the thirteenth century, a shift completed and systematized by Duns Scotus. The shift concerns being, the subject of metaphysics: from God to a universal exhibited by God and creatures alike . This shift went hand in hand with an account of signification as representation: signs, rather than being in some sense identical with the things they signify, merely represent these things. According to Boulnois—and this is where (...) the thesis becomes original—the basic motivation for the shift in opinion on the nature of metaphysics lay in the insight of Roger Bacon that spoken and written signs signify things directly, without the mediation of concepts. This means that there is no place for an analogy of being, since “being” is a sign either of things that fall under one concept or of things that together fall under many different concepts . “Being”—the object of thought—is identified by Scotus as non nihil, whatever is logically possible, and in this sense is univocal to the Aristotelian categories and to God. But identifying being in this way means that metaphysics does not restrict its study to the actually existent. It studies anything that is logically possible. But the logically possible is whatever can be represented: so the representable is in some sense the subject of metaphysics. Concepts are signs of the representable, and thought becomes a sort of semantics, a mental language of representational concepts whose objects are the representable, the logically possible. So ultimately the univocity of being can be traced too to the insights about representation: the status of being as the representable entails the univocity of being. Knowledge of the representable considered independently of actual existence is abstraction; knowledge that attends to the actual existence of the representable is intuition—though in both cases to know something is for a representation of it to inhere in the mind. The ultimately representable object is the divine essence, which somehow contains in itself all other representable objects—it contains “ideas” of everything other than the divine essence. As representable objects, however, these ideas depend for their existence on the divine essence: to this extent, God's mental contents are caused totally by himself. God does not require representations in order to cause; he causes the representable objects and thus causes his representations of them.Clearly, if Boulnois is right, the sorts of innovation usually associated with Wolff can be traced not merely to Suarez but in fact to Scotus and his contemporaries. And the relation with Kant is obvious enough, though the medievals would been unhappy with the Kantian twist—the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal.The importance of the book in the history of science is to some extent tangential: in this case, more a matter of circumscribing areas of disciplinary competence and relevance—determining the domain of physics by showing what metaphysics pertains to. And there are some faults: a failure to engage with the latest Scotist scholarship on the question of the relation between the possible and the thinkable and, likewise, a failure to consider with sufficient clarity the extent to which Scotus really agrees that spoken signs signify extramental reality directly. But overall Être et représentation is a significant achievement, essential reading for anyone interested in the history of metaphysics. (shrink)

RationaleThere are growing concerns over the occurrence of adverse physiologic events occurring in pilots during operation of United States Air Force and Navy high-performance aircraft. We hypothesize that a heightened inspiratory work of breathing experienced by jet pilots by virtue of the on-board life support system may constitute a “distraction stimulus” consequent to an increased sensation of respiratory muscle effort. As such, the purpose of this study was to determine whether increasing inspiratory muscle effort adversely impacts on attentional performance.MethodsTwelve, healthy (...) participants were recruited for this study. Participants completed six repetitions of a modified Masked Conjunctive Continuous Performance Task protocol while breathing against four different inspiratory threshold loads to assess median reaction times. A computer-controlled threshold loading device was used to set the inspiratory threshold loads. Repeated measures analysis of variances were performed to examine: the efficacy of the threshold loading device to impose significantly higher loading at each loading condition; the effects of loading condition on respiratory muscle effort sensation; and the influence of hypercapnia on MCCPT scores during inspiratory threshold loading. Generalized additive mixed effects models were used to examine the potential non-linear effects of respiratory muscular effort sensation, device loading, and hypercapnia, on MCCPT scores during inspiratory threshold loading.ResultsInspiratory threshold loading significantly augmented inspiratory effort sensation and the inspiratory pressure-time product. Our analyses also revealed that median hit RT was positively associated with inspiratory effort sensation during inspiratory loading trials.ConclusionThe findings of this work suggest that it was not increasing inspiratory muscle effort per se, but rather participant’s subjective perception of inspiratory “load” that impacts negatively on attentional performance; i.e., as the degree of inspiratory effort sensation increased, sotoo did median hit RT. As such, it is reasonable to suggest that minimizing inspiratory effort sensation during high-performance flight operations may prove useful in reducing pilot RTs during complex behavioral tasks. (shrink)

Odor and color are strongly associated. Numerous studies demonstrate consistent odor‐color associations, as well as effects of color on odor perception and language. Yet, we know little about how these associations arise. Here, we test whether language is a possible mediator of odor‐color associations, specifically whether odor‐color associations are mediated by implicit odor naming. In two experiments, we used an interference paradigm to prevent the verbalization of odors during an odor‐color matching task. If participants generate color (...) associations subsequent to labeling an odor, interfering with verbalization during the task should affect the ability to make color associations. In Experiment 1, contrary to our hypothesis, verbal interference did not affect odor‐color matches. However, since performance accuracy on the verbal interference task was high, it is possible our task did not sufficiently disrupt verbal processing. In Experiment 2, we, therefore, used an active verbal interference task, and still found no difference across interference conditions. Odor naming accuracy, odor familiarity, and odor pleasantness, however, did predict odor‐color matches. This suggests that although color associations are related to semantic factors, they are not generated by recruiting odor labels in the moment. Overall, our results do not provide evidence that language plays an online role in odor‐color associations, instead, they are consistent with the claim that language may have shaped associations during development. (shrink)

Cook et al. overstate the evidence supporting their associative account of mirror neurons in humans: most studies do not address a key property, action-specificity that generalizes across the visual and motor domains. Multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data can address this concern, and we illustrate how MVPA can be used to test key predictions of their account.

ObjectiveTo apply a socioecological approach to identify risk and protective factors across levels of the “sports-ecosystem,” which are associated with mental health outcomes among athletes in para-sports and non-para sports. A further aim is to determine whether para athletes have unique risks and protective factor profiles compared to non-para athletes.MethodsA cross-sectional, anonymous online-survey was provided to all categorized athletes aged 16 years and older, registered with the Australian Institute of Sport. Mental health outcomes included mental health symptoms, general psychological (...) distress, risky alcohol consumption and eating disorder risk. Risk and protective factors across multiple levels of the socioecological model, including individual, microsystem, exosystem and macrosystem level factors were assessed via self-report.ResultsA total of 427 elite athletes participated in the study. No significant differences in the rates of mental health problems were observed between para and non-para athletes. Both differences and similarities in risk and protective factor profiles were found across the multiple levels of the sports-ecosystem. Weak evidence was also found to support the hypothesis that certain risk factors, including experiencing two or more adverse life events in the past year, sports related concussion, high self-stigma, inadequate social support and low psychological safety conferred a greater risk for poorer mental health outcomes for para athletes in particular.ConclusionRisk factors occurring across various levels of the sports ecosystem, including individual, interpersonal and organizational level risk factors were found to be associated with a range of poorer mental health outcomes. The association between mental ill-health and certain risk factors, particularly those at the individual and microsystem level, appear to be greater for para athletes. These findings have important implications for policy and mental health service provision in elite sports settings, highlighting the need for more nuanced approaches to subpopulations, and the delivery of mental health interventions across all levels of the sports ecosystem. (shrink)

This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes (...) between three types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated to the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely-studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages. (shrink)

Some factors affecting marital distances have been studied in two Outer Hebridean islands, Harris (843 marriages) and Barra (444 marriages), over the period 1855-1990. In each island marital distances fell before 1900, but then rose to their greatest values after the 1950s. Fishermen generally married at the shortest distances and men in land-based occupations at the longest. The depression in the fishing industry during the 1880s and early 1890s was associated with reductions in marital distances, especially among fishermen. In the (...) different regions of Harris, marital distances were least in the south-east, where settlement was most dense, and greatest in the south-west where it was most sparse. (shrink)

In the year ending March 2020, an estimated 773,000 people in England and Wales were sexually assaulted. These types of crimes have lasting effects on victims’ mental health, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a large body of literature which identifies several factors associated with the likelihood of the victim reporting a sexual assault to the police, and these differences may be due to rape myth stereotypes which perpetuate the belief that rape is only “real” under certain (...) conditions. Less is known, however, about the effect these rape myths and stereotypes have on the investigation process itself and the subsequent police outcomes assigned to sex offences. This study aimed to address this gap, providing a profile of all RASSO committed over a 3-year period in one English police force, the police outcomes of these offences, and whether any offences, suspect, or victim variables were associated with different outcomes, in particular the decision to charge or cases where victims decline to prosecute. In line with previous research, the majority of victims were female while the majority of suspects were male, and the most frequent victim–suspect relationship was acquaintance, followed by partner/ex-partner. Charge outcomes were more likely in SSOs and less in rape offences, more likely with stranger offences and less likely than offences committed by partners/ex-partners and relatives, and some non-white suspects were more likely to be charged than suspects of other ethnicities, including white suspects. Victim attrition was more likely in cases where the suspect was a partner or ex-partner and least likely where the suspect was a stranger, more likely in SSOs than in rape cases, and more likely when the victim ethnicity was “other”. Law enforcement should be aware of the potential biases, both relating to rape myths and stereotypes and to the biased treatment of victims and suspects based on demographic characteristics, and work to eliminate these to ensure a fairer and more effective RASSO investigative process. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch on interpersonal synchrony has mostly focused on a single modality, and hence little is known about the connections between different types of social attunement. In this study, the relationship between sympathetic nervous system synchrony, movement synchrony, and the amount of speech were studied in couple therapy.MethodsData comprised 12 couple therapy cases. Synchrony in electrodermal activity, head and body movement, and the amount of speech and simultaneous speech during the sessions were analyzed in 12 sessions at the start of couple (...) therapy and eight sessions at the end of therapy. Synchrony was calculated from cross-correlations using time lags and compared to segment-shuffled pseudo synchrony. The associations between the synchrony modalities and speech were analyzed using complex modeling.FindingsCouple therapy participants’ synchrony mostly occurred in-phase. Anti-phase synchrony was more common in movement than in sympathetic nervous system activity. Synchrony in sympathetic nervous system activity only correlated with movement synchrony between the client-therapist dyads. Movement synchrony and the amount of speech correlated negatively between spouses and co-therapists, meaning that the more time the dyad members talked during the session, the less bodily synchrony they exhibited.ConclusionThe different roles and relationships in couple therapy were associated with the extent to which synchrony modalities were linked with each other. In the relationship between clients and therapists, synchrony in arousal levels and movement “walked hand in hand”, whereas in the other relationships they were not linked. Generally, more talk time by the therapy participants was associated with anti-phase movement synchrony. If, as suggested, emotions prepare us for motor action, an important finding of this study is that sympathetic nervous system activity can also synchronize with that of others independently of motor action. (shrink)

For a robot to be capable of development it must be able to explore its environment and learn from its experiences. It must find opportunities to experience the unfamiliar in ways that reveal properties valid beyond the immediate context. In this paper, we develop a novel method for using the rhythm of everyday actions as a basis for identifying the characteristic appearance and sounds associated with objects, people, and the robot itself. Our approach is to identify and segment groups of (...) signals in individual modalities based on their rhythmic variation, then to identify and bind causally-related groups of signals across different modalities. By including proprioception as a modality, this cross-modal binding method applies to the robot itself, and we report a series of experiments in which the robot learns about the characteristics of its own body. (shrink)

This paper provides a categorization of cross-modal experiences. There are myriad forms. Doing so allows us to think clearly about the nature of different cross-modal experiences and allows us to clearly formulate competing hypotheses about the kind of experiences involved in different cross-modal phenomena.

The importance of learning and categorizing social objects and events has become widely acknowledged over a couple of decades. Although findings from field studies have suggested that non-human animals have sophisticated abilities to recognize social objects, there is relatively little experimental evidence on this issue. Some studies have revealed animals’ excellent skills for discriminating visual and auditory social stimuli. However, because of perceptual resemblances among stimuli, it is still not clear that they recognize these objects with conceptual mechanisms that are (...) independent of the perceptual characteristics of the stimuli. At the same time, whether their concepts have an aspect of transferring information from one modality to another has not received much attention. This paper advocates approaches to a cross-modal aspect of concepts as a new framework to solve these problems, and introduces the latest studies on cross-modal representations of social objects in non-humans. (shrink)

In the present study, cross-modal (i.e., across sensory modalities such as smell and sound) iconicity (i.e., resemblance) and indexicality (i.e., contiguity) in lexical sensory and emotional signs in Finnish Sign Language will be considered from an articulatory perspective (i.e., the production of signs). Such cross-modal iconicity has not been extensively studied previously, so here, with the help of cognitive semiotics, I aim to carefully describe the cross-modal patterns observed across 118 signs, including 60 sensory (...) signs and 58 emotional signs. The analysis is framed within the theoretical model of Semiotic Hierarchy, which entails a non-reductionist view of meaning. In addition, a pheno-methodological triangulation will be applied: phenomenology (first-person method), literature of phenomenological and semiotic descriptions (second-person perspective) and experimental findings (third-person perspective). The results of this analysis show that (a) 71 of the 118 sensory and emotional signs are cross-modally indexical, (b) only 10 of the 71 signs can be regarded as cross-modally iconic, (c) cross-modal iconicity is highly diagrammatic, (d) iconicity and indexicality are highly integrated, and (e) articulatory feedback matters in the formation of semiotic patterns. This study contributes to our understanding of cross-modal iconicity in signed languages, as well as studies in semiotic systems more generally. (shrink)

Three priming experiments were conducted to determine how information about the self from different sensory modalities/cognitive domains affects self-face recognition. Being exposed to your body odor, seeing your name, and hearing your name all facilitated self-face recognition in a reaction time task. No similar cross-modal facilitation was found among stimuli from familiar or novel individuals. The finding of a left-hand advantage for self-face recognition was replicated when no primes were presented. These data, along with other recent results suggest (...) the brain processes/represents information about the self in highly integrated ways. (shrink)

Early modern humans developed mental capabilities that were immeasurably greater than those of nonhuman primates. We see this in the rapid innovation in tool making, the development of complex language, and the creation of sophisticated art forms, none of which we find in our closest relatives. While we can readily observe the results of this high-order cognitive capacity, it is difficult to see how it could have developed. We take up the topic of cave art and archeoacoustics, particularly the discovery (...) that cave art is often closely connected to the acoustic properties of the cave chambers in which it is found. Apparently, early modern humans were able to detect the way sound reverberated in these chambers, and they painted artwork on surfaces that were acoustic “hot spots,” i.e., suitable for generating echoes. We argue that cave art is a form of cross-modality information transfer, in which acoustic signals are transformed into symbolic visual representations. This form of information transfer across modalities is an instance of how the symbolic mind of early modern humans was taking shape into concrete, externalized language. We also suggest that the earliest rock art found in Africa may constitute one of the first fossilized proxies for the expression of full-fledged human linguistic behavior. (shrink)