Classic change blindness is the phenomenon where seemingly obvious changes which coincide with visual disruptions (such as blinks or brief blanks) go unnoticed by an attentive observer. Some early work into the causes of classic change blindness suggested that any pre-change stimulus representation is overwritten by a representation of the altered post-change stimulus, preventing change detection. However, recent work revealed that even when observers do maintain memory representations of both the pre- and post-change stimulus states, they can still miss the (...) change, suggesting that change blindness can also arise from a failure to compare the stored representations. Here we study slow change blindness, a different but related phenomenon that occurs even in the absence of visual disruptions when the change occurs sufficiently slowly, to determine whether it could be explained by conclusions from classic change blindness. Across three different slow change blindness experiments we found that observers, who consistently failed to notice the change, had access to at least two memory representations of the changing display. One representation was precise but short-lived: a relatively detailed representation of the more recent states of slow-change display, but fragile. The other representation lasted longer but was fairly general: stable but too coarse to differentiate the various stages of the changing display. These findings suggest that although multiple representations are formed, the failure to compare hypothesis might not explain slow change blindness; even if a comparison were made, the representations formed would be either too sparse (longer term stores) or too fragile (short-lived stores) for such a comparison to be informative about a change. (shrink)

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1–11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions12–14, produce an abnor- mally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of (...) judgements on moral dilemmas that pit compelling considerations of aggregate welfare against highly emotionally aversive behaviours (for example, having to sacrifice one person’s life to save a number of other lives)7,8. In contrast, the VMPC patients’ judgements were normal in other classes of moral dilemmas. These findings indicate that, for a selective set of moral dilemmas, the VMPC is critical for normal judgements of right and wrong. The findings support a necessary role for emotion in the generation of those judgements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wandering the Magnetosphere*Ingrid Koenig (bio)Navigation notes: These emergent drawings–excerpts from a visual essay–take up the complex network of impacts across physical forces entangled with bio-geo-political time. A key element for this work is a living cosmography to depict movement across time, and to visualize wandering on a planet, in the magnetosphere, and between the internal energy of Earth and the solar energy of the cosmos. Physicists say there (...) are no things, there are only relations between things.Q: Hello ancient stone - may I unfold you like a book? Do you carry a message from deep time? A: Yes, what you’re holding is not a thing, but a process. Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing from Svalbard, Day 17 expedition, 2019[End Page 97]Drifting on a rocky planet, between the internal energy of Earth and the solar energy of the cosmos–we live within a “cosmo-tectonic circulation” —Jerome Gaillardet, geo-chemist. Click for larger view View full resolutionGeocosmic Logic[End Page 98] Click for larger view View full resolutionHow Entropy is Time (detail) Click for larger view View full resolutionMagnetic Story[End Page 99] Click for larger view View full resolutionMessage From Deep Time 3 Click for larger view View full resolutionMessage From Deep Time 1[End Page 100] Click for larger view View full resolutionLooping Matters 1 (Litli-Hrutur, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionLooping Matters 2[End Page 101] Click for larger view View full resolutionMother Rock Waves (Miradalir Valley, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionMother Rock in Time[End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolutionVolcanic Logic (Miradalir Valley, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionSonic Lava (Miradalir Valley, Iceland)[End Page 103] Click for larger view View full resolutionWaves Across Time (Miradalir Valley, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionDisorientations[End Page 104] Click for larger view View full resolutionMessage From Deep Time 2 Click for larger view View full resolutionGravitational Thought[End Page 105] Click for larger view View full resolutionMagnetic Thought (Miradalir Valley, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionDistance Ladder Collapse[End Page 106] Click for larger view View full resolutionMattering Logic 3 Click for larger view View full resolutionMattering Logic 4[End Page 107] Click for larger view View full resolutionHow We Make Time into Space Click for larger view View full resolutionHow Entropy is Time (detail 2–Svalbard)[End Page 108]Ingrid Koenig Ingrid Koenig is Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, Canada. She was the inaugural Artist in Residence (2011 to 2021) at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator center, and co-organizes processes of collaboration between artists and physicists in a project called Leaning Out of Windows. Her studio and research practices traverse the fields of physics, social history, feminist theory, and narratives of science. Her drawings explore the complex phenomena of physics and involve intuitive responses to specific sites through fieldwork in Canada’s Rocky Mountains, Germany, Iceland, Arctic Circle art + science expeditions, and through collaborations with physicists. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Goethe Institute, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She co-edited the recently published book, Leaning Out of Windows: An Art and Physics Collaboration (Figure 1 Publishing, 2023).Footnotes* Excerpts from Wandering the Magnetosphere–drawings by Ingrid Koenig, 2019 to 2023, and ongoingCopyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc... (shrink)

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information is lexically encoded in the representation of verbs and some is not. In this paper, we propose that semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon, a sentence continuation study, and an on-line sentence processing study which confirm that both factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant (...) information. (shrink)

Within the growing developmental literature on children's testimonial learning, the emphasis placed on children's evaluations of testimonial evidence has shielded from view some of the more collaborative dimensions of testimonial learning. Drawing on recent philosophical work on testimony and interpersonal trust, we argue for an alternative way of conceptualizing the social nature of testimonial learning. On this alternative, some testimonial learning is the result of a jointly collaborative epistemic activity, an activity that aims at the epistemic goal of true belief, (...) but that does so by means of an irreducibly social process. (shrink)

With postmodern societies placing a strong emphasis on making full use of one’s time, it is increasingly common to extol busy individuals as more achieving. In this context, although feeling a social expectation to be busy might imply that individuals are regarded as competent and desirable, its accompanying stressors may also detrimentally impact their mental health. Utilising data from a seven-day diary study, the current research examined the relationship between people’s daily perceived pressure to be busy and their daily emotional (...) wellbeing. Multilevel modelling revealed that daily social pressure to be busy was a significant predictor of daily negative affect, anxiety, and depressive symptoms at the within-person level. Of import, individuals’ trait emotional complexity acceptance moderated these relationships, with those lower on emotional complexity acceptance reporting significantly higher negative affect, anxiety, and depressive symptoms on days they felt greater social pressure to be busy. These effects were not observed among those higher on emotional complexity acceptance. Together, the current findings suggest that social pressure to feel busy is generally related to poorer daily emotional wellbeing, and that those with higher trait emotional complexity acceptance have an advantage of maintaining their emotional wellbeing in the face of such a social pressure. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The law, serving as a codification of the commitments and values of “White space,” often treats love and justice as separable and separate values, experiences, and institutions. Black love, on the contrary, is bound up with and, even, identified with justice. This inextricability is painted masterfully in the interstices of Zora Neale Hurston's, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The story, widely framed as a woman's journey to autonomy and love, is just as much the story of her search for (...) justice. This article uses Hurston's narrative of love and justice, Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy of humanization, and law to illustrate the implications of Black love for engaging legal justice in White space. It concludes that liberation for Black people demands humanizing legal praxis. (shrink)

Natural Law, Science, and the Social Construction of Reality looks at changes in knowledge and the relationship to values from the modern era to today. Author Bernie Koenig examines Newton's influence on Locke and Kant, how Kant influenced Darwin and Freud, and the implications of their work for both anthropology and moral theory.

Paul Appelbaum and colleagues propose four models of informed consent to research that deploys whole genome sequencing and may generate incidental findings. They base their analysis on empirical data that suggests that research participants want to be offered incidental findings and on a normative consensus that researchers incur a duty to offer them. Their models will contribute to the heated policy debate about return of incidental findings. But in my view, they do not ask the foundational question, In the context (...) of genome sequencing, how much work can consent be asked to do? (shrink)

This book addresses the processes behind how we resolve moral issues and the factors that can impact that such as differing values and cultures.

A comprehensive overview of art criticism as it relates to art value and aesthetics argues that art can impart insights into the natural and human world in ways akin to those of philosophy and science. Reprint.

[1] The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl -- The existential philosophy of Albert Camus -- The existenz philosophy of Karl Jaspers -- The philosophy of Gabriel Marcel -- The philosophy of Martin Heidegger -- v. 2. The existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard -- The existential philosophy of Ortega y Gasset -- The philosophy of Martin Buber -- The existential philosophy of Nicolas Berdyaev -- The philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.

Evidence on AI acceptance comes from a diverse field comprising public opinion research and largely experimental studies from various disciplines. Differing theoretical approaches in this research, however, imply heterogeneous ways of studying AI acceptance. The present paper provides a framework for systematizing different uses. It identifies three families of theoretical perspectives informing research on AI acceptance—user acceptance, delegation acceptance, and societal adoption acceptance. These models differ in scope, each has elements specific to them, and the connotation of technology acceptance thus (...) changes when shifting perspective. The discussion points to a need for combining the three perspectives as they have all become relevant for AI. A combined approach serves to systematically relate findings from different studies. And as AI systems affect people in different constellations and no single perspective can accommodate them all, building blocks from several perspectives are needed to comprehensively study how AI is perceived in society. (shrink)

As with any proposal for institutional reform, and especially one that has gained so much ground in such a short amount of time, this paper asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement is good for corporations. Are businesses stronger with DEI practices and ideas or weaker? We believe that the DEI movement is asking the right questions: How do we create more just and equitable institutions? The challenge, however, is whether this movement is giving the right answers to such (...) questions. The main premise of our paper is that without deeper principles than DEI itself, these qualities of corporate life will be misunderstood, misused, and disordered in our increasingly fragmented and politicized culture. We propose in this essay that “subsidiarity” serves as one of those deeper principles that can order and enrich our understanding of DEI. It serves as a gift principle that begins to reveal the deepest nature of our work, namely, that our work allows us to exercise our gifts in serving others. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Wie kann Gottes Gegenwart trotz ihrer Verborgenheit wahrgenommen werden? In dem folgenden Beitrag möchte ich zeigen, wie Simone Weil die Erfahrungen der Verborgenheit und der Abwesenheit Gottes als Signatur des Unglücks und der Entwurzelung der Menschen in der Moderne analysiert. Des Weiteren wird dargestellt, wie Simone Weil vor diesem Hintergrund mit einer kreuzestheologischen Denkfigur reflektiert, wie die Gottesliebe in besonderer Weise im Unglück verborgen anwesend sein kann, trotz Erfahrung der Abwesenheit Gottes. Hier schließt sich die erkenntnistheoretische Frage nach der (...) Wahrnehmbarkeit der verborgenen Gegenwart Gottes an. So soll ausgeführt werden, wie Simone Weil aufzeigt, wie durch ästhetische Formen der Schönheit und Ordnung der Welt, durch ethische Formen von Nächstenliebe und Freundschaft und durch die religiöse Formen in Liturgie und Gebet als höchster Form der Aufmerksamkeit die verborgen gegenwärtige Gottesliebe indirekt wahrgenommen werden kann. Dies spricht schließlich für eine andere Deutung der Verborgenheit Gottes als im sog. Verborgenheitsargument von J. L. Schellenberg, mit dem von der Verborgenheit auf die Nichtexistenz Gottes geschlossen wird. (shrink)

Psychologists have emphasized children's acquisition of information through firsthand observation. However, many beliefs are acquired from others' testimony. In two experiments, most 4yearolds displayed sceptical trust in testimony. Having heard informants' accurate or inaccurate testimony, they anticipated that informants would continue to display such differential accuracy and they trusted the hitherto reliable informant. Yet they ignored the testimony of the reliable informant if it conflicted with what they themselves had seen. By contrast, threeyearolds were less selective in trusting a reliable (...) informant. Thus, young children check testimony against their own experience and increasingly recognise that some informants are more trustworthy than others. (shrink)

Cosmopolitics, the concept of a world politics based on shared democratic values, is in an increasingly fragile state.

Cultural difference has been largely ignored within bioethics, particularly within the end-of-life discourses and practices that have developed over the past two decades in the U.S. healthcare system. Yet how should culturebe taken into account?

Globalization processes are propelling a transformation of governance. As political problems become more transnational, public as well as private actors increasingly perform governance activities beyond the level of individual states. This book examines the wide variety of forms that governance can take in the global system and their consequences. An overarching analytical framework is applied to global institutions and initiatives in areas such as trade liberalization, financial market regulation, privacy protection, cybercrime, and food safety.

This study was concerned with Wason's THOG task, a hypothetico-deductive reasoning problem for which performance is typically very poor ( < 20% correct). Recently, however, Needham and Amado (1995) and Koenig and Griggs (2004) have observed both facilitation and spontaneous analogical transfer effects for the Pythagoras version of this task. Based on their findings, Koenig and Griggs concluded that in addition to the separation of the data (the properties of the designated THOG) from the hypotheses that need to (...) be generated (the possible combinations of properties written down), an explicit request to generate these hypotheses is necessary to obtain significant analogical transfer. In the present study we extended the generalisability of this conclusion in three experiments with 214 undergraduate participants using O'Brien et al.'s (1990) Blackboard version of the task. We discuss the relationship of the results to dual process theories of reasoning and propose that analogical transfer may be a better criterion than task facilitation for judging participants' task understanding. (shrink)

This paper argues for a largely unnoted distinction between relational and modal components in the lexical semantics of verbs. Wehypothesize that many verbs encode two kinds of semantic information:a relationship among participants in a situation and a subset ofcircumstances or time indices at which this relationship isevaluated. The latter we term sublexical modality.We show that linking regularities between semantic arguments andsyntactic functions provide corroborating evidence in favor of thissemantic distinction, noting cases in which the semantic groundingof linking through participant-role properties (...) apparently fails. Thissemantic grounding can be preserved, however, once we abstractaway from sublexical modality in lexical semantic representations.Semantically-based linking constraints are insensitive to the sublexicalmodality component of lexical entries and depend only on informationin a predicator's situational core. (shrink)

We support Jaswal & Akhtar's interrogation of social motivational accounts of autism and discuss two sources of bias that contribute to how others construe autistic people's communications: an experience-based bias that limits our ability to discern the speaker's action as communicative and a prejudice against the credibility of certain speakers that limits a listener's willingness to believe their testimony.

Can there be a global demos? The current debate about this topic is divided between two opposing camps: the “pessimist” or “impossibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is either conceptually or empirically impossible, and the “optimist” or “possibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is conceptually as well as empirically possible and an embryonic version of it already exists. However, the two camps agree neither on a common working definition of a (...) global demos, nor on the relevant empirical facts, so it is difficult to reconcile their conflicting outlooks. We seek to move the debate beyond this stalemate. We argue that existing conceptions of a demos are ill-suited for capturing what kind of a global demos is needed to facilitate good global governance, and we propose a new conception of a demos that is better suited for this purpose. We suggest that some of the most prominent conceptions of a demos have focused too much on who the members of a demos are and too little on what functional characteristics the demos must have in order to perform its role in facilitating governance within the relevant domain. Our new proposal shifts the emphasis from the first, “compositional” question to the second, “performative” one, and provides a more “agency-based” account of a global demos. The key criterion that a collection of individuals must meet in order to qualify as a demos is that it is not merely demarcated by an appropriate membership criterion, but that it can be organized, democratically, so as to function as a state-like agent. Compared to the existing, predominantly “compositional” approaches to thinking about the demos, this agency-based approach puts us into a much better position to assess the empirical prospects for the emergence of a global demos that can facilitate good global governance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Joy and Aggravation of Being a Career Nursing AssistantDonald KoenigI am a male career nursing assistant with 10 years experience. I also happen to be the Ohio Chair Person for the Male Nursing Assistants Task Force. This task force is designed to help recruit, offer continuing education, increase public awareness, and help maintain the good quality men that work as career nursing assistants.Today I want to talk to (...) you about what it is like to be a nursing assistant. Let me walk you through a day of a nursing assistant. I work the day shift. My day starts at 6:45 am. The first thing I do when I arrive at work is to check the schedule for three things: first, to see what my assignment is; second, to note how many nursing assistants are scheduled for the whole nursing home for that shift; and finally, I check to see if there are any shower aides scheduled and, if so, what sections they are assigned to that day.Once I arrive at my assignment area I check to see how many of my residents are showers and how many assistants from the night shift have already done the morning care of getting residents dressed and up for the day. Federal Regulations are one nursing assistant for every fifteen residents. There are some days that there are more staff scheduled and I will have fewer residents; unfortunately those days do not occur often enough. If I am lucky I end up only having six to eight residents to do morning care with.Now it is time for the breakfast trays to arrive on the floor. Even though I am only assigned to take care of my residents, I have to help pass trays to all residents on my side of the building (61 in my case). First I pass the trays to all residents that require help eating or are total feeds. It is now about 8:30 a.m. and all the residents have been fed and it is time to pick up all the trays and record their intake.Now I am ready to get my report from the nurse and start doing my morning get-ups. Like I said earlier, I have anywhere from six to eight residents to do morning care with. This will include washing, [End Page 141] dressing, mouth and hair care and finally getting them up into their chair. I usually have about two or two and a half hours to accomplish this before it is time for me to go to lunch. During the time I am doing morning care, I am also responsible for answering call lights in my section for all fifteen residents under my care. Most sections will have residents who require two or three assistants per resident for transfers from bed to chair, so when it is time to transfer I have to go looking for help in my area and also must help my co-workers with their transfers. So what this averages out to, if I am lucky, is about fifteen minutes with each resident. I do not know about you but I take longer than that to get ready in the morning. It is now 11:00 a.m. and time for my lunch break of 30 minutes, my first break of the day to sit and relax.It is now lunchtime and there are four aides on the floor. Two at a time go to lunch, leaving the other two to cover the floor for the next hour. Hopefully, everyone got all their residents up and all you have to do is answer call lights, which can be for anything from wanting a pain pill, or wanting to go to the toilet, or needing to be changed because they had an accident. Oh yes, and in between all that I start to take residents down to one of the two dining rooms. One dining room is for those who can feed themselves and the other is for residents who need assistance eating or need to be fed.Lunch is over for the aides and it is time for two aides to... (shrink)

The axiological idealism of Georges Bastide, which is itself an attempt to come to grips with basic philosophical problems in a form wholly in accord with the preoccupations of our times, offered a unique opportunity for coming into contact with two new horizons - critical idealism and axiological personalism. An examination of the intimate relationship between these two viewpoints promised to be of special interest and worthy of research. A similar theme is encountered in the philosophy of R. Le Senne (...) and a number of works have been devoted to the study of his philosophy. However, in Bastide's axiological idealism the emphasis is on the relationship between the problem of spiritual conversion and the problem of the transfiguration of values and, as far as I know, no major study has been made of Bastide's philosophy. This study also opened up the possibility of a deeper understanding of the philosophies of Descartes and Kant, as well as the philosophies of Brunsch vicg and Bergson. Bastide's philosophy offers new possibilities for reflection on the past in the light of contemporary problems, just as his own work can be understood only in the light of the philosophies which are the chief inspi ration for his axiological idealism. In this regard we have devoted three chapters of historical background in order to introduce the main influences on Bastide's philosophy. (shrink)