This paper responds to a recent challenge for the validity of extrapolation of neurobiological knowledge from laboratory animals to humans. According to this challenge, experimental neurobiology, and thus neuroscience, is in a state of crisis because the knowledge produced in different laboratories hardly generalizes from one laboratory to another. Presumably, this is so because neurobiological laboratories use simplified animal models of human conditions that differ across laboratories. By contrast, I argue that maintaining a multiplicity of experimental protocols and simple models (...) is well justified. It fosters rather than precludes the validity of extrapolation of neurobiological knowledge. The discipline is thriving. (shrink)

The following study examines the critical interplay between ideology, mediated reality, and the role that individuals’ perceptions, beliefs, and actions play in this process. In doing so, the study delves into the examination of the way power structures and dominant narratives proceed into influencing cultural expression and, consequently, impact social action. It is thus argued that in contemporary society, the Situationist notion of “the spectacle” has replaced any understanding of reality and created a reified social world dominated by commodities that (...) reinforce dominant ideologies and determine subjective perceptions. Furthermore, the paper addresses the impact of this mediated reality on personal subjectivity and agency. Drawing on Marx’s metaphor of the “camera obscura” as ideology, it argues for a transformative “reversal of perspective” that changes how individuals view and engage with their environment. Ultimately, this study underscores the profound impact of “the spectacle” on social relations, ideology, and perception. It argues for a transformative and creative approach that challenges individuals to resist the grasp of the spectacle, reclaim their agency, and develop new perspectives for interacting with the world. The extensions of the gaze subtly refer to the basis of economy manifested as “false consciousness” reflected by the camera obscura as an inverted image but readjusted with the tools of spectacles and mirrors within the reflective apparatus. (shrink)

Awareness of the risks posed by excess nitrogen is low beyond the scientific community. As public understanding of scientific issues is partly influenced by news reporting, this article is the first to study how the British press has discussed nitrogen pollution. A corpus-assisted frame analysis of newspaper articles highlighted five frames: Activism, where environmental charities and organizations are portrayed as having an active role in fighting pollution; Government Responsibility, where privatization is presented as central and positioned as one of the (...) main causes of pollution; Industry Responsibility, in which industries’ actions are depicted as causing pollution to increase; Pollutions as Politics, in which pollution is not discussed as a problem to be solved but rather as a means to increase votes; and Risk, where readers are warned about the possible effects of pollution on human health, flora and fauna. The analysis also points to the absence of named scientists and sources with the coverage being dominated by politicians. (shrink)

When attempting to predict future events, people commonly rely on historical data. One psychological characteristic of judgmental forecasting of time series, established by research, is that when people make forecasts from series, they tend to underestimate future values for upward trends and overestimate them for downward ones, so-called trend-damping. Events in a time series can be experienced sequentially, or they can also be retrospectively viewed simultaneously, not experienced individually in real time. In one experiment, we studied the influence of presentation (...) mode on two sorts of judgment: predictions of the next event and estimation of the average value of all the events in the presented series. Participants' responses in dynamic mode were anchored on more recent events than in static mode for all types of judgment but with different consequences; hence, dynamic presentation improved prediction accuracy, but not estimation. These results are not anticipated by existing theoretical accounts; we develop and present an agent-based model—the adaptive anchoring model —to account for the difference between processing sequences of dynamically and statically presented stimuli. ADAM captures how variation in presentation mode produces variation in responses in both forecasting and judgment tasks. ADAM's model predictions for the forecasting and judgment tasks fit better with the response data than a linear-regression time series model. Moreover, ADAM outperformed autoregressive-integrated-moving-average and exponential-smoothing models, while neither of these models accounts for people's responses on the average estimation task. (shrink)