With an emphasis on self-study and the connections between the personal and the professional domain, the authors reflect upon their teaching practice on a postgraduate theatre-based course using the research methodology of a/r/tography. The aim was to develop understanding of teacher/student roles and how these can affect learning. Through researcher reflexivity, focus groups and questionnaires, data were captured from students/participants responding to a video of the researcher’s solo performance work. The research presents itself through three a/r/tographic renderings. First, the experience (...) of seeing tutors in unfamiliar roles is considered. Second, the impact of witnessing tutors taking risks as a performer and being vulnerable is discussed and, lastly, the work illuminates new ways of opening up as teachers. The authors explore how the student’s/participant’s perception of them as tutors seemed to change after witnessing them as artists and how this impacted upon student’s learning for their own assessed performance pieces. (shrink)

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is notable for the readiness with which it drew on the results of cognitive psychology. These naturalistic elements were not well received and Kuhn did not subsequently develop them in his pub- lished work. Nonetheless, in a philosophical climate more receptive to naturalism, we are able to give a more positive evaluation of Kuhn’s proposals. Recently, philosophers such as Nersessian, Nickles, Andersen, Barker, and Chen have used the results of work on case-based reasoning, analogical (...) thinking, dynamic frames, and the like to illuminate and develop various aspects of Kuhn’s thought in Structure. In particular this work aims to give depth to the Kuhnian concepts of a paradigm and incommensurability. I review this work and identify two broad strands of research. One emphasizes work on concepts; the other focusses on cognitive habits. After contrasting these, I argue that the conceptual strand fails to be a complete account of scientific revolutions. We need a broad approach that draws on a variety of resources in psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

A nationwide survey that included personal interviews in 1,021 households studied the incidence, species, and numbers of nonhuman animals kept in Costa Rican households. A total of 71% of households keep animals.The proportion of households keeping dogs is 3.6 higher than the proportion of households keeping cats . In addition to the usual domestic or companion animals kept in 66% of the households, 24% of households keep wild species as pets. Although parrots are the bulk of wild species kept as (...) pets, there is vast species diversity, including other birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, fishes, and invertebrates - typically caught in their natural habitat to satisfy the pet market. The extraction from the wild and the keeping of such animals is by-and-large illegal and often involves endangered species. Costa Ricans, in a conservative estimate, keep about 151,288 parrots as pets. More than half the respondents have kept a psittacid at some point in their lives. Pet keeping is a common practice in Costa Rican society, and its incidence is high by international standards. (shrink)

Over the course of the latter part of the 20th century the notion that some animals might partake in a cultural form of life has gained growing support in the natural sciences. Iconic examples of tool using chimpanzees, sweet potato washing macaques, and milk bottle opening birds have captured scientific and popular interest alike. But at the same time that this effort to describe, define, and study animal cultures was developing, the global ecological crisis was deepening. This article explores this (...) strange juxtaposition. It offers a critical overview of the concept of animal culture as it has taken shape in the natural sciences. Building on this foundation, the article explores how and why animal cultures matter at the edge of extinction, exploring possible roles for the environmental humanities, extinction studies, and philosophical ethology, in developing new approaches to the question of animal culture in a time of escalating biodiversity loss. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A "Hypostatic Union" of Two Practices but One Person?Paul F. KnitterThis is going to be an awkwardly personal reflection. But that, I understand, is what the assignment given to the members of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies panel "Constructing Buddhist Identities in the West" called for: I was asked to reflect upon "How I as a Western Christian have appropriated Buddhist practice and teachings into my religious identity." I'm (...) grateful for this invitation, because it has provided me with the occasion to realize, quite startlingly, that what I have thought and written about my "Buddhist-Christian identity" in the past really isn't quite accurate.But first let me offer a bird's eye, and therefore limited, view of my two-faced identity: I was born into a traditional, not very critical, Catholic family in the Chicago of seventy-three years ago. At thirteen, I decided (against my parents' wishes) to enter a minor seminary in order to become a priest, and went through the whole fourteen years of training. For the last four years of that training I had the profoundly good fortune to be sent to Rome, arriving there in 1962, two weeks before more than two thousand bishops marched into St. Peter's Basilica to start the Second Vatican Council (the renewing effects of which were much more lasting, it seems, in my psyche than in the psyche and structures of the Vatican!). Ordained a priest in 1966 and animated with Vatican II's new openness to other religions, I did a dissertation at the University of Marburg, Germany, on Christian theologies of religions. When I returned to the United States in 1972, I taught theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and when I decided to leave the Catholic priesthood in 1975, I moved to Xavier University in Cincinnati, where I continued teaching theology for some twenty-eight years.It was during those years, in the 1980s, that I began not only to teach courses on Buddhism but also to practice daily Zen meditation. Gradually, I came to realize that Buddhism, its theory and practice, was seeping into and coloring the way I understood and practiced my Christian creed—to the point that in 2007 I took refuge in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition and since then have been under the guidance of my teacher, Lama John Makransky. It was around this time that I faced the need to figure out just what or who I was—a Buddhist Christian or a Christian Buddhist. So, typical academic that I am, I wrote a book. [End Page 19]In Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, I declared and defended my primary identity as a Christian who was thoroughly drenched in Buddhism.1 But when I recently read Rose Drew's penetrating analysis of various ways of blending dual religious belonging in her Christian or Buddhist? An Exploration of Dual Religious Belonging, I started to wonder.2 From her ethnographic study of actual dual belongers, she found that (a) some have a primary religious identity (the group to which I thought I belonged), (b) some alternate between both primary identities, (c) some cannot attribute primacy to either or any identity, and (d) some are too bewildered by it all to say anything.3 As I pondered Drew's description and analysis of her interviewees' meanderings back and forth across religious lines, I had to admit that I wasn't sure where I belonged. So when the request for this paper came along, I saw it as an opportunity to help myself sort things out.An Inappropriate AnalogyMy problem is that as my Christian and Buddhist practices have continued over these recent five to ten years, more and more, I cannot keep them apart. They remain clearly distinct, but unlike Roger Corless, of blessed memory, I have not been able to honor their distinct identities by practicing them, as Roger apparently did, separately: being a Buddhist from Monday to Thursday, and a Christian from Friday to Sunday (and then waiting to see what would happen). Rather, for me, when I am at Mass, I hear the words of the Scripture readings or of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Making the Aristophanic AudienceNiall W. SlaterAristophanic comedy is rich in address to its audience and comments on the audience's behavior. It must be said at once, however, that this is not dispassionate reporting: Aristophanes' purpose in commenting on his audience is nearly always to redirect its attention or to shape or reshape the behavior of that audience. A study of the full extent of Aristophanes' attempts to shape the (...) response of his audience is beyond the scope of discussion here, where the focus is primarily on his strategies for controlling and directing the attention and response of his audience in general. Let me also make one methodological assumption explicit at this point. When the characters or chorus in Aristophanes remark on audience behavior, these comments must have some basis in reality in order either to be humorous or to influence that behavior: if things are not quite as Aristophanes describes them, they nonetheless must be close enough to reality for the audience to understand and react to them.The most basic problem of audience response in the theater is to make sure there is a response. Let me therefore begin simply with the problem of attention and attention span in the theater. There is still dispute as to whether the program of the City Dionysia was shortened during the war years from five to three comedies. I believe (against Wolfgang Luppe) that it was, which helps explain the comedy of a passage in Birds.1 In the play's parabasis, the chorus issues an invitation to the spectators to join their new bird city. If they join the city of birds, the audience is told, they will acquire wings, which will allow them to escape human limitations. In a superb parody of the common tragic choral theme of "I wish I were a bird and could fly away from here," the chorus enumerates the advantages of wings. One is, they would allow the spectators to fly away from the boring performances of tragedy! [End Page 351].(Birds 785–89)There's nothing better or more pleasant than to grow wings. Now, if one of you spectators had wings, when he was hungry he could escape the tragic performances, fly off home, have lunch, and then when he was full, fly back here again to us.Another advantage would be to slip away for a quick sexual encounter:.(793–96)And if any of you happens to be carrying on an affair with a married woman, and he sees the lady's husband in the Boule's seats, he again could have flown away from you with his wings, then after screwing her flown from her place back here again.These jokes work best, I submit, if Birds comes on in the afternoon, for they suggest a certain waning of audience interest and distraction by hunger as the morning's tragic tetralogy marched on. The solution? Skip the boring tragedy bits, head home for lunch, but do come back for "us," that is, the comedy at the end of the day's program.2Aristophanes is of course far too sensible to suggest directly that the spectators might be bored by the comedies on offer. He does allude to the problem of attention span in another way. Ecclesiazusae was probably produced in 393 B.C., well after the end of the war, when the [End Page 352] Dionysia certainly offered a full five comedies. At the end of the play, the chorus says it has a small request:.(1154–62)I want to make a small request of the judges: that the clever ones, remembering the clever stuff in this play, vote for me; those having a good laugh, vote for me because of the laughs; in fact, I want just about everybody to vote for me; and don't let the lot be any fault for us, that we drew the first position, but you must remember all these things. Don't transgress your oath, but always judge the choruses fairly, and don't imitate those low–class trollops, who always only remember their most recent customers.We shall come back to this passage when we consider... (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper presents a method for teaching undergraduate students how to write better term papers in philosophy. The method integrates two key assignment components: scaffolding and peer review. We explain these components and how they can be effectively combined within a single term paper assignment. We then present the results of our multi-year research study on the integrated method. Professor observations, quantitative measures, and qualitative feedback indicate that student writing improves when philosophy term paper assignments are designed to generate multiple (...) rounds of drafting and review. (shrink)

Affective theory of mind (aToM) impairments associated with the youth antisocial phenotype callous-unemotional (CU) traits predict antisocial behaviour above CU traits alone. Importantly, CU traits associate with decrements in complex but not basic aToM. aToM is modulated by cognitive control and CU traits associate with cognitive control impairments; thus, cognitive control is a plausible mechanism underlying aToM impairments in CU traits. Because cognitive control is dependent on the availability of cognitive resources, youth with CU traits may have difficulty with allocating (...) cognitive resources under greater demands that impact complex aToM. To test this, 81 participants (ages 12–14, Female = 51.8%, Male = 48.2%) were recruited to complete a behavioural paradigm that involved an initial aToM task with complex and basic emotions followed by placing additional demands on cognitive control and a final repeat of the same aToM task. Results indicate adolescents higher in CU traits had intact basic aToM but less accuracy in complex aToM that worsened after taxing cognitive control; and this load only required a short duration to account for ToM decrements (200 ms [range 150–1600 ms]). These results demonstrate CU traits association with cognitive control limitations that impact complex aToM. This may partially explain antisocial behaviour associated with CU traits. (shrink)

A study involving purchasing managers was conducted to test specific Hunt-Vitell theoretical propositions concerning the determinants of managers' teleological evaluations. We extended the Hunt-Vitell model by developing a new integrative construct, namely the desirability of consequences to self versus others. We hypothesized that desirability of consequences affects teleological evaluations in that the more desirable the consequences of a particular action, the more likely managers evaluate that action positively. The results of the present study provided support for this hypothesis. Furthermore, we (...) extended the Hunt-Vitell model by developing a new integrative construct, namely the desirability of consequences of self versus others. We hypothesized that cognitive moral development moderates the relationship between the desirability of consequences of self versus others and teleological evaluation. The results failed to support this hypothesis. We explained the lack of support in terms of the level of aggregation of the data, the possibility of the confounding effect of respondents' sensitivity to ethical issues, and the possibility that deontological evaluations confounded the respondents' teleological judgments. Future research and managerial implications of the findings were also discussed. (shrink)

ObjectivePhysical isolation measures, known as lockdown or shelter-in-place, experienced during coronavirus disease 2019 have the potential to cause psychological distress. This study was conducted to examine parents’ perceived stress and whether reports of rewards and challenges during lockdown impact stress.MethodsData were collected using a cross-sectional online survey in New South Wales, Australia, across the 4-week lockdown. The survey was completed by 158 parents of children aged under 6 years. Stress was measured using the short form of the Perceived Stress Scale. (...) Rewards and challenges were reported in response to two open-ended questions.ResultsThere was a weak negative correlation between PSS-4 scores and days in isolation, with parents who had spent longer in isolation reporting fewer stress symptoms. The relationship between time in isolation and stress was moderated by the degree to which parents described more rewards than challenges: parents who perceived high rewards and low challenges reported lower PSS-4 scores with more days in lockdown, whereas parents who perceived low rewards and high challenges reported higher PSS-4 scores with more days in lockdown. The moderation model examining associations between time in isolation and rewards ratio explained 13% of the variance in PSS-4 scores.ConclusionLockdowns are not uniformly or consistently negative experiences for parents. Identifying positive aspects of the experience may serve to buffer negative mental health risks across time. Understanding resilience strategies is critical for supporting current psychological wellbeing and to adequately prepare for future pandemic experiences. (shrink)

Phylogenetic trees are a crucial backbone for a wide breadth of biological research spanning systematics, organismal biology, ecology, and medicine. In 2015, the Open Tree of Life project published a first draft of a comprehensive tree of life, summarizing digitally available taxonomic and phylogenetic knowledge. This paper reviews, investigates, and addresses the following questions as a follow-up to that paper, from the perspective of researchers involved in building this summary of the tree of life: Is there a tree of life (...) and should we reconstruct it? Is available data sufficient to reconstruct the tree of life? Do we have access to phylogenetic inferences in usable form? Can we combine different phylogenetic estimates across the tree of life? And finally, what is the future of understanding the tree of life? A schematic of the process of building a unified tree of life. Inputs are published phylogenetic estimates and a unified taxonomy. These inputs are combined into a summary supertree containing ≈2 million taxa. The relationships among any subset of taxa may easily be accessed and used in downstream analyses. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The specific mechanisms whereby Pavlovian conditioning leads to adaptive behavior need to be elaborated. There is no evidence that it is via reduction in the “destabilizing effect that time lags have on feedback control” (Domjan et al. 2000, sect. 3.3). The adaptive value of Pavlovian conditioning goes well beyond the regulation of social behavior.

In this article, we are exploring a methodological approach to research on faith and religious expressions in urban Africa. We are committed to trans-disciplinary work that pursues research methods mutually liberating for researchers, co-researchers and community participants and that results in long-term benefits and strengthened agency on the part of the host communities. Our reflections in this article are based on a collaborative research project1 in two regions of Pretoria, Tshwane2 – Pretoria Central and Mamelodi East – in which we (...) explore how religious innovation and competition in and amongst churches contribute to the healing or perpetuation of urban fractures. (shrink)

Friedrich Waismann (1896–1959) was one of the most gifted students and collaborators of Moritz Schlick. Accepted as a discussion partner by Wittgenstein from 1927 on, he functioned as spokesman for the latter’s ideas in the Schlick Circle, until Wittgenstein’s contact with this most faithful interpreter was broken off in 1935 and not renewed when exile took Waismann to Cambridge. Nonetheless, at Oxford, where he went in 1939, and eventually became Reader in Philosophy of Mathematics (changing later to Philosophy of Science), (...) Waismann made important and independent contributions to analytic philosophy and philosophy of science (for example in relation to probability, causality and linguistic analysis). The full extent of these only became evident later when the larger (unpublished) part of his writings could be studied. His first posthumous work The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (1965, 2nd edn.1997; German 1976) and his earlier Einführung in das mathematische Denken (1936) have recently proved of fresh interest to the scientific community. This late flowering and new understanding of Waismann’s position is connected with the fact that he somewhat unfairly fell under the shadow of Wittgenstein, his mentor and predecessor. Central to this book about a life and work familiar to few is unpublished and unknown works on causality and probability. These are commented on in this volume, which will also include a publication of new or previously scattered material and an overview of Waismann’s life. (shrink)

Global society is facing formidable current and future problems that threaten the prospects for justice and peace, sustainability, and the well-being of humanity both now and in the future. Many of these problems are related to science and technology and to how they function in the world. If the social responsibility of scientists and engineers implies a duty to safeguard or promote a peaceful, just and sustainable world society, then science and engineering education should empower students to fulfil this responsibility. (...) The contributions to this special issue present European examples of teaching social responsibility to students in science and engineering, and provide examples and discussion of how this teaching can be promoted, and of obstacles that are encountered. Speaking generally, education aimed at preparing future scientists and engineers for social responsibility is presently very limited and seemingly insufficient in view of the enormous ethical and social problems that are associated with current science and technology. Although many social, political and professional organisations have expressed the need for the provision of teaching for social responsibility, important and persistent barriers stand in the way of its sustained development. What is needed are both bottom-up teaching initiatives from individuals or groups of academic teachers, and top-down support to secure appropriate embedding in the university. Often the latter is lacking or inadequate. Educational policies at the national or international level, such as the Bologna agreements in Europe, can be an opportunity for introducing teaching for social responsibility. However, frequently no or only limited positive effect of such policies can be discerned. Existing accreditation and evaluation mechanisms do not guarantee appropriate attention to teaching for social responsibility, because, in their current form, they provide no guarantee that the curricula pay sufficient attention to teaching goals that are desirable for society as a whole. (shrink)

A report of a problem-based learning project on the ethics of terminal care, offered as one of the options available to first year MB ChB students in Edinburgh University Medical School. The project formed part of the 'clinical correlation course' in the new curriculum. Six students took part under the supervision of two clinical tutors and a moral philosopher. The course was case-based and practical with students being given the opportunity over a period of eight weeks to meet patients, relatives (...) and hospital staff at a local geriatrics hospital and terminal care home. The main issue studied was the degree of choice available to patients electing to be treated at home, in hospital or in a hospice. Other issues included: pre-death, disposal of the dead, certification of death, communication with relatives and follow-up bereavement services. (shrink)

Responsible data management is a multifaceted topic involving standards within the research community regarding research design and the sharing of data as well as the collection, selection, analysis and interpretation of data. Transparency in the manipulation of images is increasingly important in order to avoid misrepresentation of research findings, and research oversight is also critical in helping to assure the integrity of the research process. Intellectual property issues both unite and divide academe and industry in their approaches to data management. (...) Central to the realization and promulgation of responsible data management is clear and careful communication of standards and expectations within the research community to trainees as well as among colleagues. These topics are examined and explored in depth in a special issue of Science and Engineering Ethics on responsible data management. (shrink)

What is science, and what is it not? Is falsifiability the key to drawing this line? How and why does science work? Should we worry whether science is talking about a "real" world? And should we stop thinking there is a single thing we can call "the scientific method"? With Deborah Mayo, Robert Rynasiewicz, and Drew Arrowood.

This volume brings together the religious and philosophical writings of the founders of Russian religious philosophy, Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky. Both began their intellectual careers in the literary world of the 1820s. The texts collected here make the philosophical concepts of Sobornost (community, universality, wholeness, ecumenicity) and integral knowledge, available to western readers. Based on the primacy of the heart, the spiritual wholeness of the human being and the cognitive will, integral knowing moves beyond rationality to union with the (...) object of knowledge in knowing. This book provides an introduction to Russian religious philosophy, and a profound, meditative text for anyone concerned with human and spiritual unity. Also included are two responses to Slavophile ideas by the prominent Russian philosophers Pavel Florensky and Nikolai Berdiaev. (shrink)

Surgical innovation promises improvements in healthcare, but it also raises ethical issues including risks of harm to patients, conflicts of interest and increased injustice in access to health care. In this article, we focus on risks of injustice, and use a case study of robotic prostatectomy to identify features of surgical innovation that risk introducing or exacerbating injustices. Interpreting justice as encompassing matters of both efficiency and equity, we first examine questions relating to government decisions about whether to publicly fund (...) access to innovative treatments. Here the case of robotic prostatectomy exemplifies the difficulty of accommodating healthcare priorities such as improving the health of marginalized groups. It also illustrates challenges with estimating the likely long-term costs and benefits of a new intervention, the difficulty of comparing outcomes of an innovative treatment to those of established treatments, and the further complexity associated with patient and surgeon preferences. Once the decision has been made to fund a new procedure, separate issues of justice arise at the level of providing care to individual patients. Here, the case of robotic prostatectomy exemplifies how features of surgical innovation, such as surgeon learning curves and the need for an adequate volume of cases at a treatment centre, can exacerbate injustices associated with treatment cost and the logistics of travelling for treatment. Drawing on our analysis, we conclude by making a number of recommendations for the just introduction of surgical innovations. (shrink)

Western philosophy’s relationship with prisons stretches from Plato’s own incarceration to the modern era of mass incarceration. Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration draws together a broad range of philosophical thinkers, from both inside and outside prison walls, in the United States and beyond, who draw on a variety of critical perspectives (including phenomenology, deconstruction, and feminist theory) and historical and contemporary figures in philosophy (including Kant, Hegel, Foucault, and Angela Davis) to think about (...) prisons in this new historical era. All of these contributors have experiences within prison walls: some are or have been incarcerated, some have taught or are teaching in prisons, and all have been students of both philosophy and the carceral system. The powerful testimonials and theoretical arguments are appropriate reading not only for philosophers and prison theorists generally, but also for prison reformers and abolitionists. (shrink)

Alexithymia is characterized by difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotion. Identifying and describing one’s emotion involves several cognitive processes, so alexithymia may result from a number of impairments. Here we propose the alexithymia language hypothesis—the hypothesis that language impairment can give rise to alexithymia—and critically review relevant evidence from healthy populations, developmental disorders, adult-onset illness, and acquired brain injury. We conclude that the available evidence is supportive of the alexithymia–language hypothesis, and therefore that language impairment may represent one of (...) multiple routes to alexithymia. Where evidence is lacking, we outline which approaches will be useful in testing this hypothesis. (shrink)

One of the dominant behavioral markers of visual-expert search strategy, Holistic Visual Processing (HVP), suggests that experts process information from a larger region of space in conjunction with a more focused gaze pattern in order to improve search speed and accuracy. To date, extant literature suggests that visual search expertise is domain specific, including HVP and its associated behaviors. The current study is the first to use eye tracking to directly measure the HVP strategies of two expert groups, radiologists and (...) architects, in comparison to one another and a novice control. In doing so, we replicated and extended this prior research: visual expertise is domain specific. However, our eye tracking data indicate that contrary to this prior work, HVP strategies are transferable across domains. Yet, despite the transfer of HVP strategies, there is neither reduced search time nor greater accuracy in visual search outside of an expert’s domain. Therefore, our data suggest that HVP behaviors are a particular form of visual search mechanism that, outside of an expert’s native search-ecology, are not necessarily conducive to more general visual search success. It is in addition to explicit knowledge of an expert’s domain, how to search, and where to search, that HVP strategies are their most effective for visual search success. (shrink)

Studies in the psychology of visual expertise have tended to focus on a limited set of expert domains, such as radiology and athletics. Conclusions drawn from these data indicate that experts use parafoveal vision to process images holistically. In this study, we examined a novel, as-of-yet-unstudied class of visual experts—architects—expecting similar results. However, the results indicate that architects, though visual experts, may not employ the holistic processing strategy observed in their previously studied counterparts. Participants (n = 48, 24 architects, 24 (...) naïve) were asked to find targets in chest radiographs and perspective images. All images were presented in both gaze-contingent and normal viewing conditions. Consistent with a holistic processing model, we expected two results: (1) architects would display a greater difference in saccadic amplitude between the gaze- contingent and normal conditions, and (2) architects would spend less time per search than an undergraduate control group. We found that the architects were more accurate in the perspectival task, but they took more time and displayed a lower difference in saccadic amplitude than the controls. Our research indicates a disjunctive conclusion. Either architects are simply different kinds of visual experts than those previously studied, or we have generated a task that employs visual expertise without holistic processing. Our data suggest a healthy skepticism for across-the-board inferences collected from a single domain of expertise to the nature of visual expertise generally. More work is needed to determine whether holism is a feature of all visual expertise. (shrink)

Online gaming creates unique public spaces of interaction. These spaces are both highly controlled but also able to slip through the regulatory net, as domestic legislation struggles to respond to fast-changing interjurisdictional environments. Inter- and transdisciplinary research hold potential to respond to questions surrounding the regulation of these online spaces, by exploring multiple perspectives. The authors of this paper each come from a unique starting point in their exploration of these issues. The paper will examine three spaces of regulation in (...) online game world environments. It will look at (1) rules and regulations that governs online interaction in virtual spaces, (2) the ‘code’ that controls behaviour through game architecture, and (3) the laws that are developed by players inside the game world. The first part will analyse whether domestic law can be adequate to regulate a space that is not geographically fixed. The second will discuss how the coding of the game and its architecture regulate behaviours within the space. The last is a “bottom-up” regulatory system, originating within the gaming community. Where do these three layers of regulation interact with each other? What are the unique languages of these spaces? This paper is a starting point for further investigation into the regulation of online behaviours through interwoven rule systems. (shrink)

The temporal structure of behavior contains a rich source of information about its dynamic organization, origins, and development. Today, advances in sensing and data storage allow researchers to collect multiple dimensions of behavioral data at a fine temporal scale both in and out of the laboratory, leading to the curation of massive multimodal corpora of behavior. However, along with these new opportunities come new challenges. Theories are often underspecified as to the exact nature of these unfolding interactions, and psychologists have (...) limited ready-to-use methods and training for quantifying structures and patterns in behavioral time series. In this paper, we will introduce four techniques to interpret and analyze high-density multi-modal behavior data, namely, to: (1) visualize the raw time series, (2) describe the overall distributional structure of temporal events (Burstiness calculation), (3) characterize the nonlinear dynamics over multiple timescales with Chromatic and Anisotropic Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA), (4) and quantify the directional relations among a set of interdependent multimodal behavioral variables with Granger Causality. Each technique is introduced in a module with conceptual background, sample data drawn from empirical studies and ready-to-use Matlab scripts. The code modules showcase each technique’s application with detailed documentation to allow more advanced users to adapt them to their own datasets. Additionally, to make our modules more accessible to beginner programmers, we provide a “Programming Basics” module that introduces common functions for working with behavioral timeseries data in Matlab. Together, the materials provide a practical introduction to a range of analyses that psychologists can use to discover temporal structure in high-density behavioral data. (shrink)

Commentators have tended to focus on the conceptual framework of our article, the contrast between genetic and associative accounts of mirror neurons, and to challenge it with additional possibilities rather than empirical data. This makes the empirically focused comments especially valuable. The mirror neuron debate is replete with ideas; what it needs now are system-level theories and careful experiments – tests and testability.