Sensory Individuals: Unimodal and Multimodal Perspectives provides an interdisciplinary, well-balanced, and comprehensive look at different aspects of unisensory and multisensory objects, using both nuanced philosophical analysis and informed empirical work. The research presented in this book represents the field's progression from treating neural sensory processes as primarily modality-specific towards its current state of the art, according to which perception, and its supporting neural processes, are multi-modal, modality-independent, meta-modal, and task-dependent. Even within such approaches sensory stimuli, properties, brain activations, and corresponding (...) perceptual phenomenology can still be characterized in a modality-specific way. The book examines the basic building blocks of human perception, and whether they are best understood as sense modality dependent units of different forms or multimodal perceptual objects. The book combines a variety of innovative and integrative angles to explore the topic and acts as a catalyst for an increasingly diverse field of research, which is in an exciting phase of growth and advancement. New questions are arising as quickly as they are being answered, and the collection Sensory Individuals provides an original and up-to-date addition to the field. (shrink)

Current research suggests that conceptual in?uences are primarily responsible for inducing synaesthesia, since numerous synaesthetic variants are triggered by linguistic symbols. These linguistic synaesthesias are the focus of the present review article. This article examines the literature on the transfer of synaesthetic colour-associations across languages and shows the scope of the linguistic mechanisms that are implicated. We review known evidence about the interaction between grapheme-colour synaesthesia and the acquisition of a second language, and specifically, we discuss cases of cross-linguistic transfer (...) in which a second language is learned later in life. Research on bilingual subjects has uncovered distinct representations in the brain for a mother tongue and for a later-acquired foreign language. Consequently, these differences have implications for synaesthesia associated with the writing systems of these different languages. By reviewing several individual cases of bilingual synaesthetes, we conclude that synaesthesia might have different types of influences on the acquisition of a second language, ranging from effects that support this learning to those that disturb it. (shrink)

In synesthesia, a certain stimulus (eg grapheme) is associated automatically and consistently with a stable perceptual-like experience (eg color). These associations are acquired in early childhood and remain robust throughout the lifetime. Synesthetic associations can transfer to novel inducers in adulthood as one learns a second language that uses another writing system. However, it is not known how long this transfer takes. We found that grapheme-color associations can transfer to novel graphemes after only a 10-minute writing exercise. Most subjects experienced (...) synesthetic associations immediately after learning a new Glagolitic grapheme. Using a Stroop task, we provide objective evidence for the creation of novel associations between the newly learned graphemes and synesthetic colors. Also, these associations generalized to graphemes handwritten by another person. The fast learning process and the generalization suggest that synesthesia begins at the semantic level of representation with the activation of a certain concept (the inducer), which then, uniquely for the synesthetes, activates representations at the perceptual level (the concurrent). Thus, the results imply that synesthesia is a much more flexible and plastic phenomenon than has been believed until now. (shrink)

'Sensory Individuals: Unimodal and Multimodal Perspectives' provides an interdisciplinary, well-balanced, and comprehensive look at different aspects of unisensory and multisensory objects, using both nuanced philosophical analysis and informed empirical work.

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which an additional nonstandard perceptual experience occurs consistently in response to ordinary stimulation applied to the same or another modality. Recent studies suggest an important role of semantic representations in the induction of synesthesia. In the present proposal we try to link the empirically grounded theory of sensory-motor contingency and mirror system based embodied simulation to newly discovered cases of swimming-style color synesthesia. In the latter color experiences are evoked only by showing the synesthetes a (...) picture of a swimming person or asking them to think about a given swimming style. Neural mechanisms of mirror systems seem to be involved here. It has been shown that for mirror-sensory synesthesia, such as mirror-touch or mirror-pain synesthesia, concurrent experiences are caused by the overactivity in the mirror neuron system responding to the specific observation. The comparison of different forms of synesthesia has the potential of challenging conventional thinking on this phenomenon and providing a more general, sensory-motor account of synesthesia encompassing cases driven by semantic or emulational rather than pure sensory or motor representations. (shrink)

Dustin Stokes’s book contributes to one of the continuing debates in empirically informed philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences which concerns the relation between thought and perception. The book sheds new light on such questions as: whether vision is modular, informationally encapsulated, and thus cognitively impenetrable or rather the opposite – whether it is malleable and sensitive to further improvements by cognitive states. Stokes supports the latter by referring to empirical evidence on perceptual expertise. Proponents of the modular and malleable (...) architectures of the mind offer different explanations of the phenomena involved in perceptual expertise, viz. object identification and categorization. Interestingly, both views assume some kind of automaticity of the recognitional capacities for identifying and categorizing objects. In this article, I examine the influence of perceptual expertise on object recognition and how the seeming automaticity of object recognition may be approached from the modularist and antimodularist (malleabilist) perspectives. (shrink)

This collection of new essays on sensory individuals in unimodal and multimodal perception features contributions by outstanding researchers in the fields of philosophy of perception, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. The topics investigated include conceptual, developmental, and methodological aspects of object perception, and especially how various sense modalities construct their objects from sensory features and feature bearers. The interdisciplinary approach offered has enabled new directions in research on this subject. As ordered in this volume, the topics of the contributions progress (...) from treating neural sensory processes as primarily unisensory towards approaches that take perceptual processing to be modality-independent, meta-modal, and multimodal. Even within these latter approaches, sensory stimuli, sensory properties, brain activations, and corresponding perceptual phenomenology have often been characterized in a modality-specific way. Thus, it is timely to explore the relation between those processes that are unisensory and those that are multisensory. One of the primary themes of this collection is examining whether the basic building blocks of human perception are best understood as modality-dependent units of different forms or in terms of multimodal perceptual objects. Another theme is the relation between low-level object processing (segmentation and perceptual grouping processes) and high-level object knowledge embracing object concept and object-related expectations. A final theme is the role that perceptual objects play as loci of unification in unimodal and multimodal perception, namely that they enable binding and integration of sensory properties to individual entities or events. (shrink)

Sensory Individuals: Unimodal and Multimodal Perspectives provides an interdisciplinary, well-balanced, and comprehensive look at different aspects of unisensory and multisensory objects, using both nuanced philosophical analysis and informed empirical work. The research presented in this book represents the field's progression from treating neural sensory processes as primarily modality-specific towards its current state of the art, according to which perception, and its supporting neural processes, are multi-modal, modality-independent, meta-modal, and task-dependent. Even within such approaches sensory stimuli, properties, brain activations, and corresponding (...) perceptual phenomenology can still be characterized in a modality-specific way. The book examines the basic building blocks of human perception, and whether they are best understood as sense modality dependent units of different forms or multimodal perceptual objects. The book combines a variety of innovative and integrative angles to explore the topic and acts as a catalyst for an increasingly diverse field of research, which is in an exciting phase of growth and advancement. New questions are arising as quickly as they are being answered, and the collection Sensory Individuals provides an original and up-to-date addition to the field. (shrink)

Recently, swimming-style colour synaesthesia was introduced as a new form of synaesthesia. A synaesthetic Stroop test was used to establish its genuineness. Since Stroop interference can occur for any type of overlearned association, in the present study we used a modified Stroop test and psychophysiological synaesthetic conditioning to further establish the genuineness of this form of synaesthesia. We compared the performance of a swimming-style colour synaesthete and a control who was trained on swimming-style colour associations. Our results showed that behavioural (...) aspects of swimming-style colour synaesthesia can be mimicked in a trained control. Importantly, however, our results showed a psychophysiological conditioning effect for the synaesthete only. We discuss the theoretical relevance of swimming-style colour synaesthesia according to different models of synaesthesia. We conclude that swimming-style colour synaesthesia is a genuine form of synaesthesia, can be mimicked behaviourally in non-synaesthetes, and is best explained by a re-entrant feedback model. (shrink)

This is a reply to the critical commentaries of Zed Adams, Zoe Drayson, Chris Mole, and Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz. The unifying theme across all four commentaries is the question: just how radical are the ideas contained in, and implied by, Thinking and Perceiving? Does the abandonment of the modularity of mind, and an embrace of the malleability of mind, have wide reaching consequences for empirical studies of sensory perception, for cognitive architecture, for the metaphysics of mind and the epistemology (...) of perception? And which of those consequences are welcomed, and which of those are problematic? These general questions anchor in (at least) the following topics: learning and the role of cognition, object recognition, perceptual expertise, early versus late vision, perception and truth, virtue epistemology, and computational architectures of mind. This reply attempts to address the overarching question from this variety of angles taken in the four commentaries. (shrink)

This symposium focuses on Thinking and Perceiving by Dustin Stokes (2021), published by Routledge. In his précis, Stokes (2023a) provides an overview of the key arguments of his book, which lead to a new descriptive and normative account of the relationship between cognition and perception. Four commentaries examine the scope and implications of this account. Zoe Drayson (2023) and Christopher Mole (2023) examine the epistemological force of Stokes’s claims about the organisation of the human mind. Furthermore, the implications of philosophical (...) and empirical research on object recognition are discussed by Aleksandra Mroczko-Wasowicz (2023) and on perceptual learning by Zed Adams (2023). The symposium concludes with a reply by Stokes to these commentaries (Stokes, 2023b). (shrink)

The article reviews the book Słowa i zbawienie. Dyskurs religijny w perspektywie filozofii Hilarego Putnama [Words and Salvation: Religious Discourse in the Perspective of Hilary Putnam's Philosophy], by Piotr Sikora.

One of the key behavioral effects of attractiveness is increased visual attention to attractive people. This effect is often explained in terms of evolutionary adaptations, such as attractiveness being an indicator of good health. Other factors could influence this effect. In the present study, we explored the modulating role of sexual orientation on the effects of attractiveness on exploratory visual behavior. Heterosexual and homosexual men and women viewed natural-looking scenes that depicted either two women or two men who varied systematically (...) in levels of attractiveness (based on a pre-study). Participants’ eye movements and attractiveness ratings towards the faces of the depicted people were recorded. The results showed that although attractiveness had the largest influence on participants’ behaviors, participants’ sexual orientations strongly modulated the effects. With the exception of homosexual women, all participant groups looked longer and more often at attractive faces that corresponded with their sexual orientations. Interestingly, heterosexual and homosexual men and homosexual women looked longer and more often at the less attractive face of their non-preferred sex than the less attractive face of their preferred sex, evidence that less attractive faces of the preferred sex might have an aversive character. These findings provide evidence for the important role that sexual orientation plays in guiding visual exploratory behavior and evaluations of the attractiveness of others. (shrink)

Infertility Accepted treatment is replete with bioethical dilemmas regarding the limits of available medical therapies. Poland has no legal acts regulating the ethical problems associated with infertility treatment and work on such legislation has been in progress for a long time, arousing very intense emotions in Polish society. The purpose of the present study was to find out what Polish women undergoing infertility treatment think about the most disputable and controversial bioethical problems of assisted reproduction. An Attitudes towards Bioethical Problems (...) of Infertility Scale was constructed specifically for this study. Items were taken from the Bioethics Bills currently under discussion in Polish Parliament (Seym). 312 women were enrolled in the study. Women experiencing infertility favoured more liberal legislation. Participants disagreed, for example, with the following regulations: prohibition of embryo freezing, prohibition of preimplantation genetic diagnosis of embryos, age limits for women using in vitro fertilisation and prohibition of in vitro fertilisation for single women. The opinions of patients undergoing infertility treatment are an important voice in the Polish debate on the Bioethics Bills. (shrink)

Human culture is built upon nature to help humans adapt to their environment – first natural, but later natural-cultural. Cultural practices are aimed at aiding survival in changing environments, and in different settings they meet different environmental pressures, causing later changes in trajectories. According to cultural evolutionism, behaviours, ideas and artefacts are subject to inheritance, competition, accumulation of modifications, adaptation, geographical distribution, convergence and changes of function – these are mechanisms present also in biological evolution. In the following paper, we (...) examine women’s dance and physical exercise practices, which contain similar postures performed in comparable circumstances, as found in initiation ritual dances in chosen East African communities and in Slavic gymnastics for women in the Belarusian tradition. In times of globalization and the mixing of cultures, the position on knees and elbows is recontextualized in a visually attractive form of contemporary dances like Kangamoko and Baikoko, or more widely different variants of ‘twerking’ and reconstructed physical exercises. Approaching ‘twerking’ positions, especially on knees and elbows as a cross-genre performance, we find common roots in the communal support for women’s good wife and mother status teachings in various cultures, showing the importance of women’s circles, women’s health and well-being for the community. (shrink)

The present study analyzes metaphors of life, self, emotional states, and relationships in forty life stories that differ in their communicative situations and narrative goals. Twenty interviews were conducted with people who were seeking psychological help. Another twenty interviews were conducted with Russian celebrities for publication in popular psychology magazines. Metaphors in happy stories were more numerous and diverse than in unhappy stories. Some conceptual metaphors (e.g., “LIFE IS A CONTAINER,” “LIFE IS A JOURNEY,” and “EMOTION IS A PHYSICAL IMPACT”) (...) were found in both happy and unhappy narratives. More specific metaphors demonstrated significant differences between the two types of narratives. The metaphors of life as a “purposeful journey,” self as “alive and flexible object,” and emotional states as “internal and controlled forces” were used more often in happy narratives. This may reflect higher levels of activity, responsibility, and awareness of the authors of happy narratives. Specific for unhappy stories were metaphors “LIFE IS DEATH” and “SELF IS A DEAD OBJECT,” which may indicate a low level of personal well-being and serve as specific markers of personal unhappiness. The results of our study suggest that metaphors may help to construct the subjective reality of happy and unhappy life. By telling their life stories people are able to redefine their past experiences and future perspectives. Specific metaphors play an important part in defining subjective happiness or unhappiness. (shrink)

Scientists, humanists, and art lovers alike value art not just for its beauty, but also for its social and epistemic importance; that is, for its communicative nature, its capacity to increase one's self-knowledge and encourage personal growth, and its ability to challenge our schemas and preconceptions. However, empirical research tends to discount the importance of such social and epistemic outcomes of art engagement, instead focusing on individuals' preferences, judgments of beauty, pleasure, or other emotional appraisals as the primary outcomes of (...) art appreciation. Here, we argue that a systematic neuroscientific study of art appreciation must move beyond understanding aesthetics alone, and toward investigating the social importance of art appreciation. We make our argument for such a shift in focus first, by situating art appreciation as an active social practice. We follow by reviewing the available psychological and cognitive neuroscientific evidence that art appreciation cultivates socio-epistemic skills such as self- and other-understanding, and discuss philosophical frameworks which suggest a more comprehensive empirical investigation. Finally, we argue that focusing on the socio-epistemic values of art engagement highlights the important role art plays in our lives. Empirical research on art appreciation can thus be used to show that engagement with art has specific social and personal value, the cultivation of which is important to us as individuals, and as communities. (shrink)

Inclusion of children in medical decision making, to the extent of their ability and interest in doing so, should be the default position, ensuring that children are routinely given a voice. However, optimizing the involvement of children in their health care decisions remains challenging for clinicians. Missing from the literature is a stepwise approach to assessing when and how a child should be included in medical decision making. We propose a systematic approach for doing so, and we apply this approach (...) in a discussion of two challenging clinical cases. The approach is informed by a literature review, and is anchored by case studies of teenagers' refusal of clinical care, regulatory requirements for research assent, and the accepted approach to involving cognitively impaired adults in medical decisions. (shrink)

Artykuł stawia dwa pytania: jaki rodzaj etyki ekologicznej daje się wyprowadzić z posthumanistycznej refleksji i jak taka etyka mogłaby działać w konkretnej przestrzeni – ogrodzie działkowym. Interesuje mnie pole teoretyczne, kt.re wyznacza troska i namysł nad światem poza człowiekiem. Jako punktu wyjścia używam schematu trzech traum opisanego przez Zygmunta Freuda. Sytuacja człowieka po trzech traumach odczytana zostaje jako krajobraz postapokaliptyczny, w którym możliwe jest budowanie nowej etyki ekologicznej. Omawiając spektrum posthumanizmu, zwracam uwagę na problem granicy i dualizmu. Oprócz wskazania przykład.w (...) etycznych praktyk ogrodniczych, proponuję, aby w proces kształtowania struktury ogrodu włączyć śmierć ogrodników. (shrink)

This paper presents a study of Rāmacandra–Guṇacandra’s theory of aesthetics in light of the Kashmiri rasa ideology and demonstrates that the Jain authors offer a new and original conceptualization of aesthetic experience, in which the spectator remains cognitively active in the course of watching the drama. In their model, the relationship between rasa and pleasure is mediated by a cognitive error, and the feeling of pleasure does not coincide with the savoring of rasa but emerges after the savoring of rasa (...) ceases. This paper argues that Rāmacandra and Guṇacandra demystify the Kashmiri theory of aesthetics by identifying affinities between the lived world and the fictive world of drama and by rendering the regular means of knowledge, such as inference and memory, as instrumental for the experience of rasa. It further suggests that this new conceptualization, in which pleasure is contingent upon the dissolution of illusion, may have facilitated the development of playwrighting among Jain monks from the twelfth century on. (shrink)

The article deals with the concept of educational mobility and its role in the modern educational process. Due to the insufficient development of this concept in the theory and practice of school education, the author creates a universal structural and functional model for the formation of this skill, which is why special attention was paid to the complex of pedagogical conditions that can ensure the effective functioning of all elements of the system.

In this empirical study, we investigate the variation in firms’ response to institutional pressure for gender-balanced boards, focusing specifically on the preservation of prevailing practices of director selection and its impact on the representation of women on the board of directors. Using 8 years of data from publicly listed Nordic corporations, we show societal pressure to be one of the determinants of female directorship. Moreover, in some corporations, the director selection process may work to maintain “a traditional type of board”. (...) In such boards, demographic diversity among male members appears to be associated with a lower share of female directors, although we cannot establish wether this reflects discrimination or a desire to maintain critical competencies. With this paper we add to the theoretical understanding of the factors underlying female board appointments by adopting an institutional theory lens to study female board representation. Viewing the demands for gender-balanced boards in terms of societal pressure for the de-institutionalization of the prevailing norms and practices, we highlight preferences for maintaining established practices as a potentially important barrier to institutional change. On these grounds, we conjecture on the relationship between the gender diversity of boards and other diversity dimensions. We suggest that a board room gender quota is supplemented by policies to ensure the transparency of board changes, in order to prevent the crowding out of other diversity dimensions. (shrink)

Memrise is an educational tool available both online and for mobile devices. Memrise uses flashcards and mnemonic techniques to aid in teaching foreign languages and memorizing information from other subjects, e.g. geography, law or mathematics. Memrise courses are created by its users through the process of crowdsourcing; therefore they are tailored to the individual needs of the users and may focus on the specific content of a particular coursebook or classes. The paper will attempt to present possibilities of using memrise (...) in teaching and learning legal English vocabulary during a tertiary course leading to TOLES certificate examination. The paper will look at various types of exercises which facilitate memorizing vocabulary, learning collocations, prepositional phrases, develop the skill of paraphrasing and defining legal terms of art in plain English. Application of the crowdsourcing method enables the learners to participate in the process of the course creation and constitutes for them a supplementary, out of class exposure to the target language. The second part of the paper will discuss the results of the research conducted by the author among her law students. The aim of the research was to investigate the students′ opinions about memrise as a tool which might facilitate individual learning of the specialist language, as well as to assess whether memrise may influence the test results achieved by the students during the legal English course. The paper will contrastively analyse the progress tests results achieved by the students who have used memrise to revise and recycle language material and those who have chosen traditional methods of learning. The research also attempted to address the question whether the students who had been the contributors to the content of memrise courses had performed better in tests than those who had only been the users. (shrink)

We argue that although art has no systematic conventions for conveying knowledge in the way science does, the arts often play an important epistemic role in the production and understanding of scientific knowledge. We argue for what we call weak scientific cognitivism, the view that the production and distribution of scientific knowledge can benefit from engagement with art. We present a range of cases that illustrate a variety of epistemic functions of art relevant to scientific practice, and respond to influential (...) objections from anti-cognitivists that purport to show that art has no epistemic value. (shrink)

This paper argues that the missing voice in clinical ethics is that of informal caregivers. Despite their substantial contribution to care provided to individuals with disabilities, chronic illness or dementia, informal caregivers are rarely thought of as members of the healthcare team and their narratives are rarely listened to and included in clinical and ethical decisions. Addressing this gap, this paper discusses the reasons for the systemic misrecognition of informal caregivers in healthcare systems and argues for their greater narrative inclusion (...) on the clinical, legal and social planes. (shrink)

The study investigated psychometric properties of the Sport Motivation Scale-6, assessing intrinsic regulation, four extrinsic regulation constructs, and amotivation among athletes competing at a regional and national level. In particular, we tested the factorial structure of SMS-6, its short-term stability, and the associations of SMS-6 constructs with self-efficacy, self-esteem, motivational climate, and satisfaction with sport performance. Participants were 197 athletes, representing team and individual disciplines. The measurement was repeated at the three-week follow-up. Results yielded support for the six first-order factor (...) structure. More autonomous forms of motivation were related to higher levels of self-efficacy, performance satisfaction, and taskoriented motivational climate in sport organizations. Sequential multiple mediation analysis showed that the association between general self-efficacy and performance satisfaction at a follow-up was mediated by introjected regulation and personal-barrier self-efficacy. (shrink)

Managers face increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous situations that are more and more challenging to navigate. Ethical decision-making has become particularly complicated considering that codes, frameworks and protocols have proven deficient in resolving moral dilemmas. Managers’ unpreparedness to handle such challenges reflects the ineffectiveness of business ethics education, calling for new approaches towards training managers. This article makes a case for transforming business ethics education by taking it back to its roots. This implies the re-incorporation of its foundational discipline: (...) philosophy. Philosophy offers a rigorous approach for decision-making, which helps managers face the unknown. It helps them analyse situations from different perspectives, reconsider how things are done and examine the underlying premises of their thinking. It can strengthen one of the most central managerial competencies: the ability to reason, especially ethically. As the foundational discipline of business, ethics and their intersect, philosophy is uniquely positioned to elevate business ethics education for managers at all levels. It can help current and future managers to reflect more deeply and critically on the ethical issues they face. (shrink)