It is well established that prior knowledge influences reconstruction from memory, but the specific interactions of memory and knowledge are unclear. Extending work by Huttenlocher et al. (Psychological Review, 98 [1991] 352; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129 [2000] 220), we propose a Bayesian model of reconstructive memory in which prior knowledge interacts with episodic memory at multiple levels of abstraction. The combination of prior knowledge and noisy memory representations is dependent on familiarity. We present empirical evidence of the influences (...) of prior knowledge at multiple levels of abstraction, showing that the reconstruction of familiar objects is influenced toward the specific prior for that object, while unfamiliar objects are influenced toward the overall category. (shrink)

This editorial points back to the papers published in volume 18. It also announces the transfer of the position of main editor of Outlines – critical practice studies.One of the papers in vol. 18 relates directly to what is foundational to Outlines - critical practice studies: The encouragement of critique. For this reason it has been given some extensive attention here. Raffnsøe wrote: What is critique? Critical turns in the age of criticism.

This article investigates points of intersection between medievalism and memory. It mainly focuses on the formative period of the 19th century when the Norse past, the so-called Viking Age, as well as Old Norse mythology became integral parts of Danish national identity. The article homes in on Adam Oehlenschl.ger’s rejuvenation of the mythological materials and his reflections on the usefulness of the local mythologies, both for a national spirit and for poetic renewal. It is demonstrated that 19th century medievalism, with (...) its focus on mythology, essentially was a project of cultural memory, that is, of recollecting knowledge from culture’s childhood, and, additionally, that poetry, and with that imagination, plays a prominent role for the construction of a meaningful past. (shrink)

The existence of child soldiers is a problem of the ages, and there are no positive signs that it is abating. The difference now is that, with the development of modern weapons technology, children can be involved in large scale and horrific acts during conflicts. The circumstances surrounding the use of children to wage war will vary from situation to situation. Yet, it has been suggested that many people seem to have a ‘single focussed’ view of what child soldiers look (...) like, what their motivations are, and why they are engaged in activities associated with conflict. This article reflects on the recent views expressed by Mark A. Drumbl, who argues that we should ‘reimagine’ child soldiers, and offers some further views as to how this issue should best be addressed. (shrink)

In this article, we study health literacy as entangled and situated processes of authorisation of pregnant women to become competent caretakers of their own physical activity and health based on the development of the practice of ‘learning to take notice’. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork in a randomised controlled trial on physical activity during pregnancy called FitMum, we develop a processual conceptualisation of health authorisation as multidirectional flows between participants, staff and technologies. Using the concepts of attunement and authorisation from (...) Latour and Despret, we suggest that health literacy is not just something that can be acquired once and for all, but is processual and must be maintained, nurtured and developed through continuous negotiations, adjustments and adaptations to the constantly changing conditions of the health subject. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that experienced events are often mapped to too many episodic states, including those that are logically or experimentally incompatible with one another. For example, episodic over-distribution patterns show that the probability of accepting an item under different mutually exclusive conditions violates the disjunction rule. A related example, called subadditivity, occurs when the probability of accepting an item under mutually exclusive and exhaustive instruction conditions sums to a number >1. Both the over-distribution effect and subadditivity have been widely (...) observed in item and source-memory paradigms. These phenomena are difficult to explain using standard memory frameworks, such as signal-detection theory. A dual-trace model called the over-distribution model can explain the episodic over-distribution effect, but not subadditivity. Our goal is to develop a model that can explain both effects. In this paper, we propose the Generalized Quantum Episodic Memory model, which extends the Quantum Episodic Memory model developed by Brainerd, Wang, and Reyna. We test GQEM by comparing it to the OD model using data from a novel item-memory experiment and a previously published source-memory experiment examining the over-distribution effect. Using the best-fit parameters from the over-distribution experiments, we conclude by showing that the GQEM model can also account for subadditivity. Overall these results add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that quantum probability theory is a valuable tool in modeling recognition memory. (shrink)

Scholarship on the French Atlantic empire traditionally and uniquely focuses upon Africa as a source of slave labour for the American colonies. However, this article explores how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Africa emerged as a viable alternative for colonial expansion. Uncertainties about a colonial future in the New World directed French expansionist attention away from the Americas and towards the African continent, expanding its role beyond a source of labour. The intellectual underpinnings for a transfer of (...) empire first surfaced within the Physiocratic School of political economy. The article examines the emergence of such ideas and their reception within the colonial administration of the Ancien Régime. It also shows how expansion into Africa became central to the imperial agenda of the first French Republic. Exploring Africa as a substitute to colonial America helps expand the lens through which Africa is examined as part of the Atlantic World. It also reveals continuities between Ancien Régime colonialism and later French republican imperialism. (shrink)

This article describes the transformation of the agricultural economy that took place as a result of the disintegration of the state provision of marketing in Uganda in the 1970s and 1980s. In this context, the article examines how the commercialization of food crops is constructing new relations of gender within agricultural production. In the transformation caused by the commercialization of food crops, men appeared to have gained total control over food production, causing the gender relations to move from a complementary (...) to a patriarchal system. Closer examination, however, reveals an increased significance of marital bargaining and a movement from established gender roles to more negotiable relationships. The evidence underscores the continued significance of differentiated socioeconomic status to women's bargaining potential in gender relations. (shrink)

Some scripted interview questions, built as multi-unit turns, generate a response before they reach their prescribed completion. Such ‘untimely’ interruption and premature production of responses may generate flawed data. In this article I will describe how untimely interruption also presents a problem with regard to non-scripted follow-up questions – or ‘probes’ – to closed survey items. I will try to show that some probing formats are more vulnerable than others to being interrupted before the listing of a second response option. (...) I shall also consider the more general implications that probing format has for respondents’ understanding of ‘the ground rules’ for participating in a standardized interview. Current practices and recommendations for probing will be discussed in the light of the objective of collecting valid and reliable data. (shrink)

Capacities for abstract thinking and problem‐solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and brains, they may in fact be contingent on human‐specific modes of collaboration, dialogue, and shared attention. In an experimental study, we test the hypothesis that social interaction enhances cognitive processes of rule‐induction, which in (...) turn improves problem‐solving performance. Through three sessions of increasing complexity, individuals and groups were presented with a problem‐solving task requiring them to categorize a set of visual stimuli. To assess the character of participants’ problem representations, after each training session, they were presented with a transfer task involving stimuli that differed in appearance, but shared relations among features with the training set. Besides, we compared participants’ categorization behaviors to simulated agents relying on exemplar learning. We found that groups performed superior to individuals and agents in the training sessions and were more likely to correctly generalize their observations in the transfer phase, especially in the high complexity session, suggesting that groups more effectively induced underlying categorization rules from the stimuli than individuals and agents. Crucially, variation in performance among groups was predicted by semantic diversity in members’ dialogical contributions, suggesting a link between social interaction, cognitive diversity, and abstraction. (shrink)

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic is impacting the delivery of healthcare worldwide, creating dilemmas related to the duty to care. Although understanding the ethical dilemmas about the duty to care among nurses is necessary to allow effective preparation, few studies have explored these concerns. Aim: This study aimed to identify the ethical dilemmas among clinical nurses in Spain and Chile. It primarily aimed to identify nurses’ agreement with the duty to care despite high risks for themselves and/or their families, (...) describe nurses’ well-being and describe the associations between well-being and the duty to care. Research design: Cross-sectional self-reported anonymous data were collected between May and June 2020 via electronic survey distribution. Ethical considerations: The Institutional Ethical Review Committees in both countries approved the study. Findings: In total, 345 clinical nurses answered the primary question about the duty to care for the sick. Although in the total sample 77.4% agreed they have a duty to care for the sick, significant differences were found between the Spanish and Chilean samples. Overall, 53.6% of the nurses reported low levels of well-being; however, among those reporting low well-being, statistically significant differences were found between Spanish and Chilean nurses as 19.4% and 37.8%, respectively, disagreed with the statement regarding the duty to care. Discussion: Participants in both countries reported several ethical dilemmas, safety fears, consequent stress and low well-being. These results suggest that prompt actions are required to address nurses’ ethical concerns, as they might affect their willingness to work and psychological well-being. Conclusion: Our findings shed light on the ethical dilemmas nurses are facing related to the duty to care. Not only has the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic given rise to ethical challenges, but it has also affected nurses’ well-being and willingness to work during a pandemic. (shrink)

We evaluate the literature on the memorability of supernatural concepts, itself part of a growing body of work in the emerging cognitive science of religion. Specifically, we focus on Boyer’s Minimally Counterintuitive hypothesis according to which supernatural concepts tap a cognitively privileged memory-enhancing mechanism linked to violations of default intuitive inferences. Our assessment reveals that the literature on the MCI hypothesis is mired in empirical contradictions and methodological shortcomings which makes it difficult to assess the validity of competing theoretical models, (...) including the MCI hypothesis itself. In light of this fractured picture, we make the case for an account of the MCI effect which dispenses with a memory mechanism specific to supernatural concepts. This account has several desirable properties. First, it preserves Boyer’s pioneering insights regarding the ontological status of supernatural concepts and the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to their cultural prevalence. Second, our account is based on independently-motivated mechanisms that are well-established in the literature. Third, this account offers a principled resolution of the tension in the extant literature between studies that do replicate the MCI effect and those that seemingly fail to do so. Finally, because the proposed mechanisms are not specific to supernatural concepts, the scope of the MCI effect may be extended to account for a broader range of highly transmissible concepts than those it was originally intended to explain. We conclude with a set of theoretical and methodological prescriptions designed to guide future research on the memorability of supernatural concepts. (shrink)

The minimally counterintuitive (MCI) thesis in the cognitive science of religion proposes that supernatural concepts are prevalent across cultures because they possess a common structure—namely, violations of intuitive ontological assumptions that facilitate concept representation. These violations are hypothesized to give supernatural concepts a memorability advantage over both intuitive concepts and “maximally counterintuitive” (MXCI) concepts, which contain numerous ontological violations. However, the connection between MCI concepts and bizarre (BIZ) but not supernatural concepts, for which memorability advantages are predicted by the von (...) Restorff (VR) effect, has been insufficiently clarified by earlier research. Additionally, the role of inferential potential (IP) in determining MCI concepts’ memorability has remained vague and only rarely controlled for. In a pre‐registered experiment, we directly compare memorability for MCI and MXCI concepts, compared to BIZ concepts, while controlling for IP as well as degree of bizarreness. Results indicate that when IP and bizarreness are controlled for, memorability of counterintuitive and BIZ concepts—relative to intuitive control concepts—is similar across concepts with one, two, and three characteristics. Findings suggest that the MCI and VR effects may be manifestations of the same underlying mechanisms. (shrink)

This article studies perceptual differences of three social robots by elementary school children of ages 6–13 years at research fairs. The autonomous humanoid robot Pepper, an advanced social robot primarily designed as a personal assistant with movement and mobility, is compared to the teleoperated AV1 robot—designed to help elementary school children who cannot attend school to have a telepresence through the robot—and the flowerpot robot Tessa, used in the eWare system as an avatar for a home sensor system and dedicated (...) to people with dementia living alone. These three robots were shown at the Norwegian national research fair, held in every major Norwegian city annually, where children were able to interact with the robots. Our analysis is based on quantitative survey data of the school children concerning the robots and qualitative discussions with them. By comparing three different types of social robots, we found that presence can be differently understood and conceptualized with different robots, especially relating to their function and “aliveness.” Additionally, we found a strong difference when relating robots to personal relations to one’s own grandparents versus older adults in general. We found children’s perceptions of robots to be relatively positive, curious and exploratory and that they were quite reflective on their own grandparent having a robot. (shrink)

Conversion to organic farming, along with its associated driving forces and barriers, has been explored intensively over the past decade, while studies on the distribution and impacts of local socio-cultural processes in relation to conversion to and diffusion of organic farming have been scarce. The concentration of organic farms in Denmark differs according to county and, moreover, there appears to be large within-county variation in the density of organic farms. The present study explores local aspects of conversion to organic farming (...) and the factors that may help explain variation in density and concentration of organic farms within smaller areas. The study is based on nine qualitative interviews with organic farmers from two neighboring areas, referred to as “mainland” and “island,” respectively. Three farms were situated in the high-density area (mainland) and the remaining six in the low-density area (island). Furthermore, five advisors with connections to the area provided information with regard to their local experience and perceptions. Three main, and to some extent interacting, issues are discussed. The first is the price of land related to local scarcity of land, in the context of structural development and the effects of agricultural policies. The second is distance – both physical and social. Cooperation and exchange of experience among organic farmers was frequent on the mainland side, while isolation and lack of interaction was more common for the island farmers. Third, the role of the agricultural advisory service and the existence of champion farmers are important: pioneer farmers on the mainland have been supported by committed agricultural advisors, while lack of organic champion farmers and low priority granted to organic farming among agricultural advisors were found on the island. (shrink)

Expanded reprint of the WIREs Science of Belief paper for Julien Musolino, Joseph Sommer, and Pernille Hemmer's The Science of Beliefs: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge University Press.