Le portrait politique de Constant est divisé en quatre parties.

Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early (...) cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing. (shrink)

Die digitale Transformation erfasst die Medien der Literatur und Literaturkritik in unterschiedlicher Geschwindigkeit. Die Substituierung der gedruckten Zeitung, der Stammheimat der Literaturkritik, durch digitale Formate ist weit vorangeschritten. Auf dem Buchmarkt ist das gedruckte Hardcover nach wie vor ein relativ stabiles Element. Der Beitrag kommentiert diese Differenz in medienhistorischer Perspektive.

"Die Kritik ist nicht die Wissenschaft." Zu diesem Ergebnis führt eine Besinnung auf den Begriff der Objektivität in der kunstwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Die aktuelle Situation, die durch wissenschaftstheoretische und methodologische Überlegungen bestimmt ist, verlangt neue Zielsetzungen und Aufgaben. Das zentrale Problem - die Begründung der Ästhetik als selbständige, moderne Wissenschaft - steht und fällt mit der Frage, ob die Kunst Gegenstand einer generellen, empirisch prüfbaren Theorie sein kann. Der zeitgenössische Strukturalismus glaubt diese Frage positiv beantworten zu können. Er versucht, die ästhetischen (...) Gebilde nicht nur als registrierbare Einzelfälle zu erklären und zu bewerten, sondern auf allgemeinere Gesetzmäßigkeiten zurückzuführen. (shrink)

The major theoretical framework relative to the perception of illusory figures is reviewed and discussed in the attempt to provide a unifying explanatory account for these phenomena.

This major work covers almost all that has been learned about the acoustics of stringed instruments from Helmholtz's 19th-century theoretical elaborations to recent electroacoustic and holographic measurements.Many of the results presented here were uncovered by the author himself over a 20-year period of research on the physics of instruments in the violin family. Lothar Cremer is one of the world's most respected authorities on architectural acoustics and, not incidentally, an avid avocational violinist and violist.The book - which was published (...) in German in 1981 - first of all meets the rigorous technical standards of specialists in musical acoustics. But it also serves the needs and interests of two broader groups: makers and players of stringed instruments are expressly addressed, since the implications of the mathematical formulations are fully outlined and explained; and acousticians in general will find that the work represents a textbook illustration of the application of fundamental principles and up-to-date techniques to a specific problem.The first - and longest - of the book's three parts investigates the oscillatory responses of bowed strings. The natural nonlinearities that derive from considerations of string torsion and bending stiffness are deftly handled and concisely modeled.The second part deals with the body of the instrument. Special attention is given to the bridge, which transmits the oscillations of the strings to the wooden body and its air cavity. In this case, linear modeling proves serviceable for the most part - a simplification that would not be possible with lute - like instruments such as the guitar.The radiation of sound from the body into the listener's space, which is treated as an extension of the instrument itself, is the subject of the book's final part.Lothar Cremer is Professor Emeritus at the Technical University of Berlin, where he served as director of the Institute for Acoustical Engineering. (shrink)

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in this way (...) provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lowerlevel RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure–ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feedforward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis. (shrink)

This book is aimed at those studying for entry into the various professions where ethical questions are commonly faced such as teaching or social work.

Die Apokalypse und apokalytische Denkbilder haben seit Jahren und Jahrzehnten Konjunktur. In einer immer neuen 'Lust am Untergang' wurden und werden in schöner Regelmäßigkeit Endzeiten beschworen und Katastrophen prognostiziert. Ganz augenfällig greifen diese Konjunkturen dabei auf Bildtraditionen zurück, die ihre Herkunft aus der biblischen Überlieferung kaum verbergen. Der Band versammelt die Vorträge einer Ringvorlesung, die an der Universität Koblenz-Landau in Landau veranstaltet wurde. Ziel war die Zusammenführung von Forschungsinteressen, die in den verschiedenen Fachrichtungen in der einen oder anderen Weise auf (...) das Themenfeld sowie im engeren Sinne auf die Johannesoffenbarung und die unterschiedlichen Wahrnehmungen dieses wirkungsmächtigen Kulturdokuments gerichtet waren. Besonderes Gewicht galt den Untergangsszenarien und deren Wahrnehmung in der Moderne. Aus dem Blickwinkel der Theologien werden die biblisch-antiken Grundlagen des apokalyptischen Denkens und deren Fortschreibung in der gelehrten Diskussion bis in die Gegenwart vorgestellt. Die Bildersprache der Johannesoffenbarung und die vielfältig anschließenden Bildtraditionen werden in literatur- und kunstgeschichtlichen Überblicksdarstellungen entwickelt und in Einzelstudien vertieft. Analysen zur produktiven Aufnahme und Verarbeitung der biblischen Muster in der Literatur, Musik, Graphik, im Film und nicht zuletzt in der jüngeren Klimadiskussion zeigen die Apokalypse und das Apokalyptische als Deutungsmuster, auf die bei der Beschreibung von Untergangsszenarien in der Moderne bis heute immer wieder zurückgegriffen wird. (shrink)