Much research on cognitive development focuses either on early-emerging domain-specific knowledge or domain-general learning mechanisms. However, little research examines how these sources of knowledge interact. Previous research suggests that young infants can make inferences from samples to populations (Xu & Garcia, 2008) and 11- to 12.5-month-old infants can integrate psychological and physical knowledge in probabilistic reasoning (Teglas, Girotto, Gonzalez, & Bonatti, 2007; Xu & Denison, 2009). Here, we ask whether infants can integrate a physical constraint of immobility into a (...) statistical inference mechanism. Results from three experiments suggest that, first, infants were able to use domain-specific knowledge to override statistical information, reasoning that sometimes a physical constraint is more informative than probabilistic information. Second, we provide the first evidence that infants are capable of applying domain-specific knowledge in probabilistic reasoning by using a physical constraint to exclude one set of objects while computing probabilities over the remaining sets. (shrink)

Inferring others’ preferences is socially important and useful. We investigated whether children infer preferences from the minimal information provided by an agent’s single action, and whether they avoid inferring preference when the action is constrained. In three experiments, children saw vignettes in which an agent took a worse toy instead of a better one. Experiment 1 shows that this single action influences how young children infer preferences. Children aged three and four were more likely to infer the agent preferred the (...) worse toy when the agent took this toy, compared with when the agent did not take either toy. Experiment 2 then shows that children consider constraints when inferring preferences from a single action. From age 5, children were less likely to avoid inferring a preference for the worse toy when the agent’s action was physically constrained. Finally, Experiment 3 provides evidence that children’s and adults’ sensitivity to constraints, when inferring preferences, is not based on a general notion of constraints, and instead depends on several specific notions. Whereas 5–6-year-olds in this experiment considered physical and socio-moral constraints when inferring preferences, they had difficulty grasping the relevance of epistemic constraints. Adults considered physical and epistemic constraints, but were not influenced by the socio-moral constraint of ownership. Together these findings contribute to a picture of cognitive development in which children are able to infer non-obvious properties on the basis of minimal concrete information, and are also sensitive to subtle changes in this information. 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

The current investigation examines children’s learning about a novel machine in a local history museum. Parent–child dyads were audio-recorded as they navigated an exhibit that contained a novel artifact: a coffee grinder from the turn of the 20th century. Prior to entering the exhibit, children were randomly assigned to receive an experimental “component” prompt that focused their attention on the machine’s internal mechanisms or a control “history” prompt. First, we audio-recorded children and their caregivers while they freely explored the exhibit, (...) and then, we measured children’s learning by asking them two questions in a test phase. Children of all ages, regardless of the prompt given, discussed most aspects of the machine, including the whole machine, its parts, and, to a lesser extent, its mechanisms. In the test phase, older children recalled more information than younger children about all aspects of the machine and appeared more knowledgeable to adult coders. Overall, this suggests that children of all ages were motivated to discuss all aspects of a machine, but some scaffolding may be necessary to help the youngest children take full advantage of these learning opportunities. While the prompts did not significantly influence the number of children who discussed the machine’s mechanisms, children who received the component prompt were rated as more knowledgeable about the machine in the test phase, suggesting that this prompt influenced what they learned. Implications for visitor experience and exhibit design are discussed. (shrink)

De Marco _et al_ 1 argue that the standard account of medical ‘invasiveness’ (as ‘incision’ or ‘insertion’) fails to capture three aspects of its existing use, namely that invasiveness can come in degrees, often depends on features of alternative medical interventions and can be non-physical. They propose a new schematic account that suggests that medical interventions can possess ‘basic invasiveness’ (which can come in degrees and of which they suggest at least two types: physical and mental), and ‘threshold invasiveness’ which (...) can depend on the alternatives a specific intervention is being compared with. While we agree that the standard account of invasiveness fails to capture existing use and are supportive of their aim, here we express scepticism about the practical utility of De Marco _et al_’s revised account. Our scepticism concerns the application of De Marco _et al’s_ revised account in the narrow context of clinician–patient communication and... (shrink)

Transitioning to food systems that are equitable, resilient, healthy and environmentally sustainable will require the cultivation and diffusion of transformational sociotechnical innovations—and grassroots movements are an essential source of such innovations. Within the literature on strategic niche management, government-provided ‘protected spaces’ where niche innovations can develop without facing the pressures of the market is an essential part of sustainability transitions. However, because of their desire to _transform_ rather than _transition_ food systems, grassroots movements often struggle to acquire such protected spaces (...) and so must determine how and where to generate change whilst being marginalised and exposed to unprotected spaces. The aim of this research is to gain a precise view of the multiple touchpoints of marginalisation that exist across the grassroots-government interface and to apply a new framework for conceptual analysis of these touchpoints that can help to identify where and how grassroots movements might be able to push against this marginalisation. The study finds that, by applying a ‘who, what, where’ framework of analysis to policies across this interface, it is possible to find pathways forward for achieving small wins towards food systems transformation. (shrink)

"New foreword by Rhian Evans Allvin"--Cover.

This volume addresses the conjoint problem of history and sociology. History has seen religion hold varied places within the timeline of the sociology of religion.The increase in world fundamentalisms, religious movements, private spiritualities and other indicators in the millennial age have today brought a renaissance to the field.

Stephanie Kleiner beschreibt das Musiktheater in der Ära einer krisengeladenen klassischen Moderne und über die Zäsur des Ersten Weltkriegs hinweg als Ort sozialer Praxis und als Medium politischer Sinnbildung. Konkret nimmt sie die beiden damals preußischen Städte Frankfurt am Main und Wiesbaden in den Blick. Entlang einer Reihe von herausragenden Festanlässen werden einige markante Stationen der politischen Festkultur beider Städte abgeschritten und ihre Bedeutung für die staatliche Repräsentation bewertet.

There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model, (...) together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature. It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations. Key Words: altruism; cognitive empathy ; comparative; emotion; emotional contagion; empathy ; evolution; human; perception-action; perspective taking. (shrink)

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social, and scientific classification. The posthuman is very much the product of world-building narratives that have their beginnings in the commercial franchise and are fundamentally rooted in (...) science, governance, and economics around the hegemonic appropriation of environments and commodification of bodies that initially fuelled white settler life worlds and continue to be operational in the way we conceive of these worlds as continuous ontological formations. The want has always been for ownership of any of these dimensions of being without regard to condition, to not remain stranded as the subsidiary of another's being, to another's claim to humanity, and finally, to escape the suffocating confines of an instrumental ontology that suggests a subcategory of humanity without rights onto itself. The Dark Posthuman distinguishes the posthuman's place within both the liberal and neoliberal imaginary and reveals how its appearance first entrenched itself through the avarice of English settler colonialism, and subsequently, through the paranoia of American slavery. This same figure of the posthuman played a crucial role in the functional adaptation of Cold War behavioural cybernetics, and thereafter, in the fetishization of technology within the era of global financialization. The shadowing of this arrangement during and beyond the long duration of humanity's domination of this world becomes the structural web work of this book. Stephanie Polsky is an interdisciplinary writer and academic working in the areas of Media Studies and Visual Culture. Her work explores the confluence of power around race and gender as technologies of governance. She has lectured widely in media and cultural studies, critical theory, and visual culture at a number of prestigious institutions including Goldsmiths University, Regent's University London, University of Greenwich, and Winchester School of Art. Most recently she has worked at California College of the Arts in Critical Studies and Diversity Studies. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Media Studies from the University of Sussex. Her books include The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019), Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015), and Walter Benjamin's Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press, 2009). (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the question of who has duties regarding poverty and what those duties demand, from within the perspective of contemporary analytic normative philosophy. The chapter is structured in three sections. Section 1 considers the duties of those living in poverty, which might be either self-regarding or other-regarding duties, and which must be tempered by concerns of overdemandingness. Section 2 considers the duties of affluent individuals. These are imperfect duties grounded in affluent individuals’ relations to the structures that (...) produce poverty: relations of contribution, benefit, and ability to change. Section 3 considers duties of collective agents – including states, for-profits, charities, and civil society groups. The poverty-related duties of these collective agents are sometimes perfect and sometimes imperfect, and include both primary and secondary duties, and both positive and negative duties. (shrink)

Ethics and Educational Technology explores the creation and implementation of learning technologies through an applied ethical lens. The success of digital tools and platforms in today's multifaceted learning and performance contexts is dependent not only on effective design and pedagogical principles but, further, on an awareness of these technologies' interactions with and implications for users and social systems. This first-of-its-kind book provides an evidence-based, process-oriented model for ethics in technology-driven instructional design and development, one that necessitates intentional reflective practice, a (...) critical and theoretically informed interrogation of technology, and a participatory, emancipatory approach to technology design and applications. Rich with real-world ethics examples and design cases, supported by reflection questions and applied activities, and attentive to ethical codes among preeminent educational technology organizations, this is an ideal resource for students, faculty, researchers, and professionals across educational technology, instructional design, learning sciences, learning engineering, organizational training, and other disciplines. (shrink)

As part of the debate on multifaceted conceptions of education, non-formal education, a field difficult to define and characterize, emerges within in-between spaces abandoned by the dominant institutional system to serve a marginalized public to whom the right to education does not extend. Beyond a mere rejection of its form, the author uses the specific context of Mali to shed light on the flexibility and capacity for adaptation of community initiatives undertaken in the field of non-formal education, such as the (...) REFLECT approach, which is directly inspired by the learners' immediate environment. This approach serves as an illustration of certain methods of encountering otherness, the other in their individuality, and acts as a starting point for (re) thinking the education for excluded and highly vulnerable populations. (shrink)

Scientists like Grace Augustine and Norm Spellman understand that seeing is important to Na'vi. They even understand that the significance of the expression I see you reaches far beyond a mere acknowledgment of someone having entered a visual field. Grace may have dedicated her life to studying Na'vi culture, but there remains an invisible barrier that prevents her from really seeing the Na'vi. Parker Selfridge and Colonel Miles Quaritch look on the elegant nymph‐like Na'vi, the desire for possession and control (...) blazes in their eyes, blinding them to what a travesty destroying the Na'vi unique way of life would be. The scientists see avatars as sweet new rides rather than actual bodies. But Grace's relationship to her Na'vi body brings out an additional element of the scientists' relationship to the Na'vi, one for which Western ethnographers studying indigenous cultures have also come under criticism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Meaning of Green Growth Sustainability, Shade‐Grown, Fair Trade Globalization Value Chain A Personal Conclusion.

2020 Gradiva Award Nominee, Best Edited Book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership considers how these factors can be understood, nurtured, or thwarted and the subsequent impact on women's identity, authority and satisfaction. Psychoanalysis has long struggled with its ideas about women, about who they are, how to work with them, and how to respect and encourage what women want. This book argues that psychoanalytic theory and practice must evolve to maintain its relevance in (...) a volatile landscape. Each section of the book begins with a chapter that reviews contemporary ideas regarding women, as well as psychoanalytic history, gender bias, and societal norms and deficits. Three composite clinical stories allow our distinguished contributors to discuss the contexts within which individual experience can be affected, and the role that clinical work may have to mobilize and advance passion and vitality. In their discussions, the interplay of clinical psychoanalysis, sociopolitical context, and understanding of gender, combine to offer a unique perspective, built on decades of scholarship, personal experience, and clinical expertise. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership will serve as a reference for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as gender studies scholars interested in the progress of psychoanalytic theory regarding women in the 21st century. Contributors to this book include: Rosemary Balsam, Brenda Bauer, Andrea Celenza, Diane Elise, Adrienne Harris, Dorothy Holmes, Nancy Kulish, Vivian Pendar, Dionne Powell, and Arlene Richards. (shrink)

Argues that positive changes in perspective and deeper spiritual connections to things greater than oneself can influence the world for the better.

Though grassroots organizations have mobilized against US environmental injustices since; the 1980s, academic definitions of environmental justice (EJ) remain limited in important ways, including: a tendency to privilege cases where activists achieve a successful, ‘tidy’ outcome; inattention to roles natural resource dependence and free market systems play in structuring environmental inequality; and a tendency to under-analyze alternative notions of EJ that result, utilized by activists who prioritize local autonomy and procedural justice in land-use decision making. Here, I argue that these (...) alternative notions of EJ help mobilize divergent forms of EJ activism-‘sites of resistance’ to industrial production systems and their risks, and ‘sites of acceptance’ to those same practices. To illustrate, I explore extensive mixed method data in the context of energy development and sites of acceptance related to uranium production in the southwestern United States. I show how alternative notions of EJ are shaped by identification with uranium production, persistent poverty and economic insecurity, and faith that increased uranium production will fuel US nuclear power production and help combat global climate change. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue S1, Page 283-298, Spring 2022.

Owned objects are typically viewed as non-fungible-they cannot be freely interchanged. We report three experiments (total N=312) demonstrating this intuition in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, children considered an agent who takes one of two identical objects and leaves the other for a peer. Children viewed this as acceptable when the agent took his own item, but not when he took his peer's item. In Experiment 2, children considered scenarios where one agent took property from another. Children said the victim (...) could take back her own property from the perpetrator, but that she could not take an identical object belonging to the perpetrator. Finally, in Experiment 3A and 3B, children considered scenarios where a teacher could give a child either of two objects to play with-an object that the child had recently played with, or another object that looked the same. Children were more likely to say that the teacher should give the object recently played with when it belonged to the child, compared with when it belonged to the teacher. These findings are informative about the basis of judgments that property is non-fungible, and about young children's representation of ownership rights. They show that children's representation of ownership rights is not limited to principles protecting owners from being deprived. Our findings instead suggest that ownership rights are viewed as pertaining to individual objects. (shrink)

A surfeit of research confirms that people activate personal, affective, and conceptual representations when perceiving the states of others. However, researchers continue to debate the role of self–other overlap in empathy due to a failure to dissociate neural overlap, subjective resonance, and personal distress. A perception–action view posits that neural-level overlap is necessary during early processing for all social understanding, but need not be conscious or aversive. This neural overlap can subsequently produce a variety of states depending on the context (...) and degree of common experience and emotionality. We outline a framework for understanding the interrelationship between neural and subjective overlap, and among empathic states, through a dynamic-systems view of how information is processed in the brain and body. (shrink)

Many meta-ethicists are alethists: they claim that practical considerations can constitute normative reasons for action, but not for belief. But the alethist owes us an account of the relevant difference between action and belief, which thereby explains this normative difference. Here, I argue that two salient strategies for discharging this burden fail. According to the first strategy, the relevant difference between action and belief is that truth is the constitutive standard of correctness for belief, but not for action, while according (...) to the second strategy, it is that practical considerations can constitute motivating reasons for action, but not for belief. But the former claim only shifts the alethist's explanatory burden, and the latter claim is wrong—we can believe for practical reasons. Until the alethist can offer a better account, then, I argue that we should accept that there are practical reasons for belief. (shrink)