Dysfunctional attentional control is observed in patients with mental disorders. However, there is no established neurophysiological method to assess attention in such patients. We showed a discrepancy in alpha-band power in the tasks that evoked internal and external attention event-related alpha-band power changes in healthy subjects during self-reflection and working memory tasks in a preliminary study. In this study, we aimed at elucidating event-related alpha-band power changes in healthy subjects during the tasks, addressing the shortcomings of the previous study. Sixteen (...) healthy volunteers were examined for the event-related power change during the tasks. The results demonstrated the discrepancy of alpha-band ERpow at 8, 10, and 12 Hz in the parieto-occipital area between the WM and SR tasks for a period between a target stimulus and a command stimulus, where a participant switched to internal attention from external attention according to the SR task and remained at external attention according to the WM task. The results suggest that alpha-band ERpow in this area is associated with the direction of attention in response to cognitive stimuli, indicating that the findings of ERpow during the two tasks would potentially aid in the clarification of the pathophysiology of the dysfunctional change in attention in patients with psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

1. Hassei to sono tenkai -- 2. Kindai kara no ayumi.

In motion-induced blindness , a target within rotating random dots is occasionally hidden from observers’ consciousness during observation. In the present study, a red ring-like cue was centered on a target and presented immediately after observers reported subjective disappearance of the target in MIB . The radius of the cue was systematically modulated. Observers quickly regained awareness of the disappeared object only after they were provided with a pinpoint cue of its location. We also found that a flickering cue at (...) 1 Hz hindered MIB when the radius of the cue was critically small . Furthermore, abrupt onset of a small square was enough to regain awareness of the target . Successful revival of the target with a small cue indicates that critical spatial distribution of visual attention determines what in the visual scene is included in visual awareness. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that two eminent Marxists in the 1930s, the Italian Antonio Gramsci and the Japanese Tosaka Jun, shared three important characteristics of so-called Western Marxism: the methodological development of Marxism, the focus on the superstructure, and the pessimism about the impossibility of immediate revolution. Showing that Gramsci and Tosaka shared these characteristics enables us to revisit the framework of “Western Marxism,” which confusingly consists of both theoretical characteristics and geographical criteria. Looking at Gramsci and Tosaka on (...) the same plane allows us to revisit Marxist thought different from the orthodox Marxism in Soviet Russia, and not strictly as a Western, but as a part of potentially global movement of thought. (shrink)

This book provides a detailed yet accessible guide to basic terminology and concepts of Indian Buddhism in all its forms. The eight chapters elucidate the principle branches of Buddhism, the Three Treasures, the elements of existence, the Seals of the Law, dependent origination, the Four Noble Truths, religious practice, and the defilements.

Antonio Gramsci rigorously analysed the modern transformation of the Catholic Church and its strategy to spread its worldview to the Italian masses through secular means. His critique of the Church largely drew on his examination of the grounds that ensured Croce’s critique was doomed to failure. Despite its harshness, Croce’s critique failed because he did not grasp that the main target of the Church’s strategy was the common sense of the masses, while Croce pursued his critique in a highly idealist (...) manner, appealing only to his fellow intellectuals. He thereby, according to Gramsci, helped to reinforce the Church’s strategy by endorsing the rigid separation between the intellectuals and the masses. In contrast, unlike Croce and orthodox Marxism, Gramsci did not dismiss religion as a mere absurdity, recognising it as a source of people’s common sense that, albeit confusing in nature, informed their worldview. Gramsci considered that even the common sense of the masses constituted an appropriate grasp of the world, or ‘good sense’. In this sense, Gramsci’s critique of religion echoed his preoccupation with the longstanding division of Italian society between the intellectuals and the masses, which prevented mass participation in politics. (shrink)

Gramsci’s concept of the “ethical state” has been interpreted as a synonym for the “regulated society”—a future society in which everybody participates in governance following the rationalization o...

帝国主義全盛の時代に武断的侵略的帝国主義に対し「倫理的帝国主義」を高唱。評価が分かれる稀代の自由主義思想家の実像に肉薄。.

Recently, several funding agencies have introduced the distribution of funds by a lottery system; however, its effects on the productivity of the research community are unclear. Simulation studies in philosophy of science have argued that a combination of peer review and lottery is an optimal method. However, these models overlook several important aspects of research activities, such as baseline funding through block grants. In this study, I constructed a general theoretical model that incorporates these aspects and argue that the conventional (...) combination of peer review and baseline funding outperforms the combination of peer review and lottery in many situations. (shrink)

The sense of agency refers to an experience in which one’s own action causes a change in environment. It is strongly modulated by both the contingency between action and its outcome and the consistency between predicted and actual action outcomes. Recent studies have suggested that the action outcome can retrospectively modulate action awareness. We suspect that the sense of agency can also be retrospectively modulated. This study examined whether the quantity of action outcome could influence the sense of agency. The (...) participants’ task was to trigger dot motion in a display and rate the extent to which they could control the initiation of dot motion. Independently of both the temporal contiguity between action and its outcome and the consistency between predicted and actual action outcomes, the speed of dot motion as an action’s outcome strongly influenced the sense of agency rating. The present study suggests that the sense of agency stems partly from the inference of action efficiency based on the quantitative aspect of action outcome. (shrink)

The English discourse marker after all and the Japanese discourse marker datte have been commonly claimed to give a reason or justification to the preceding utterance, and therefore, these two expressions are regarded as the equivalent translation counterparts to each other. This paper first attempts to propose that such an equated account is motivated by these two discourse markers constructing a similar inferential schema involved in the interpretation of the utterance including them. In fact, datte and after all make manifest (...) similar polyfunctions according to the syntactic position although they encode different lexical information. This is because these two discourse markers are indicators that contribute to the inferential phase of communication by various degrees of modulation of a cognitive gap between two different assumptions. Another aim of this paper is to differentiate a procedural constraint these two indicators encode on the interpretation of the utterance. (shrink)

Experiment with public deployment of the semantic service matchmaker to a UDDI registry for a year is described in this paper. UDDI is a standard registry for Web Services, but, its search functionality has been limited to a keyword search. Therefore, we propose an enhancement of UDDI, called Matchmaker, that supports semantic service capability discovery. Since September 2003, we have deployed the Matchmaker in one of four official UDDI registries operated by NTT-Communications. In this paper, we first introduce the Matchmaker, (...) and illustrate client tools which lower the threshold of use of semantics. Then, we evaluate this experiment by benchmarks in terms of its performance and functionality. Finally, we discuss user requirements obtained by two ways: questionnaire and observation of search behavior. (shrink)

The admissibility of Ackermann's rule? is one of the most important problems in relevant logic. While the?-admissibility of normal modal logics based on the relevant logic R has been previously discussed, the case for weaker relevant modal logics has not yet been considered. The method of normal models has often been used to prove the?-admissibility. This paper discusses which relevant modal logics admit? from the viewpoint of the method of normal models.

General frames are often used in classical modal logic. Since they are duals of modal algebras, completeness follows automatically as with algebras but the intuitiveness of Kripke frames is also retained. This paper develops basics of general frames for relevant modal logics by showing that they share many important properties with general frames for classical modal logic.

Over the last few years, I have attended several political meetings concerned with the refugee crisis, multiculturalism or Indigenous rights in Australia, meetings at which liberal democratic–minded ‘left-wing’ people came together to discuss, or agitate for change in, governmental policies. At these meetings, I always found it difficult to accept the slogans on their placards and in their speeches: ‘Shame Australia! Reconciliation for a united Australia’, ‘Wake up Australia! We welcome refugees!’ or ‘True Australians are tolerant! Let’s celebrate multicultural Australia!’ (...) My uncomfortable feeling came not only from the fact that I was left out because of my Japanese nationality but also because I had never seen or heard words like ‘shame Japan’, ‘wake up Japan’ or ‘true Japanese are...’ at Japanese ‘left-wing’ political gatherings. In Japan, these are words used only by right-wing nationalists. Indeed it is difficult to even imagine liberal-left intellectuals in postwar Japan calling for a ‘true Japanese’ political response, such is the extent to which the idea of ‘good nationalism’ is now regarded as an oxymoron. This is my starting point for an essay in which I want to be attentive to the different roles played by national in the Japanese and Australian political environments. (shrink)

Face recognition is impaired in patients with prosopagnosia, which may occur as a side effect of neurosurgical procedures. Face selective regions on the ventral temporal cortex have been localized with electrical cortical stimulation, electrocorticography, and functional magnetic resonance imagining. This is the first group study using within-patient comparisons to validate face selective regions mapping, utilizing the aforementioned modalities. Five patients underwent surgical treatment of intractable epilepsy and joined the study. Subdural grid electrodes were implanted on their ventral temporal cortices to (...) localize seizure foci and face selective regions as part of the functional mapping protocol. Face selective regions were identified in all patients with fMRI, four patients with ECoG, and two patients with ECS. From 177 tested electrode locations in the region of interest, which is defined by the fusiform gyrus and the inferior temporal gyrus, 54 face locations were identified by at least one modality in all patients. fMRI mapping showed the highest detection rate, revealing 70.4% for face selective locations, whereas ECoG and ECS identified 64.8 and 31.5%, respectively. Thus, 28 face locations were co-localized by at least two modalities, with detection rates of 89.3% for fMRI, 85.7% for ECoG and 53.6 % for ECS. All five patients had no face recognition deficits after surgery, even though five of the face selective locations, one obtained by ECoG and the other four by fMRI, were within 10 mm to the resected volumes. Moreover, fMRI included a quite large volume artifact on the ventral temporal cortex in the ROI from the anatomical structures of the temporal base. In conclusion, ECS was not sensitive in several patients, whereas ECoG and fMRI even showed activation within 10 mm to the resected volumes. Considering the potential signal drop-out in fMRI makes ECoG the most reliable tool to identify face selective locations in this study. A multimodal approach can improve the specificity of ECoG and fMRI, while simultaneously minimizing the number of required ECS sessions. Hence, all modalities should be considered in a clinical mapping protocol entailing combined results of co-localized face selective locations. (shrink)

Kripke-completeness of every classical modal logic with Sahlqvist formulas is one of the basic general results on completeness of classical modal logics. This paper shows a Sahlqvist theorem for modal logic over the relevant logic Bin terms of Routley- Meyer semantics. It is shown that usual Sahlqvist theorem for classical modal logics can be obtained as a special case of our theorem.

Kripke-completeness of every classical modal logic with Sahlqvist formulas is one of the basic general results on completeness of classical modal logics. This paper shows a Sahlqvist theorem for modal logic over the relevant logic Bin terms of Routley-Meyer semantics. It is shown that usual Sahlqvist theorem for classical modal logics can be obtained as a special case of our theorem.