There are many ways to assess face perception skills. In this study, we describe a novel task battery FEAST (Facial Expression Action Stimulus Test) developed to test recognition of identity and expressions of human faces as well as stimulus control categories. The FEAST consists of a neutral and emotional face memory task, a face and object identity matching task, a face and house part-to-whole matching task, and a human and animal facial expression matching task. The identity and part-to-whole matching tasks (...) contain both upright and inverted conditions. The results provide reference data of a healthy sample of controls in two age groups for future users of the FEAST. (shrink)

Configural face processing precedes featural face processing under the face-attended condition, but their temporal sequence in the absence of attention is unclear. The present study investigated this issue by recording visual mismatch negativity, which indicates the automatic processing of visual information under unattended conditions. Participants performed a central cross size change detection task, in which random sequences of faces were presented peripherally, in an oddball paradigm. In Experiment 1, configural and featural faces were presented infrequently (...) among original faces. In Experiment 2, configural faces were presented infrequently among featural faces, or vice versa. The occipital-temporal vMMN emerged in the 200–360 ms latency range for configural, but not featural, face information. More specifically, configural face information elicited a substantial vMMN component in the 200–360 ms range in Experiment 1. This result was replicated in the 320–360 ms range in Experiment 2, especially in the right hemisphere. These results suggest that configural, but not featural, face information is associated with automatic processing and provides new electrophysiological evidence for the different mechanisms underlying configural and featural face processing under unattended conditions. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of recognizing a face holistically and examines the experimental paradigms that serve as the “gold standards” for holistic perception. It discusses the contribution of featural and configural information to the holistic process and the controversy surrounding these often misunderstood concepts. It claims that the recruitment of holistic processes is what distinguishes faces from most types of object recognition. The discussion focuses on the kind of featural and configural information that is impaired in an (...) inverted face as well as the information that is spared. Finally, the article considers the concept of a “perceptual field” that allows for the preservation of both featural and configural information within a restricted spatial region of an inverted face. (shrink)

Previous work suggests that Asians allocate more attention to configuration information than Caucasian Americans do. Yet this cultural variation has been found only with stimuli such as natural scenes and objects that require both feature- and configuration-based processing. Here, we show that the cultural variation also exists in face perception—a domain that is typically viewed as configural in nature. When asked to identify a prototypic face for a set of disparate exemplars, Japanese were more likely than Caucasian Americans (...) to use overall resemblance rather than feature matching. Moreover, in a speeded identity-matching task, Japanese were more accurate than Americans in identifying the spatial configuration of features (e.g., eyes). Together, these findings underscore the robustness of culture’s influences on cognition. (shrink)

We propose the quantum field formalism as a new type of stochastic Markov process determined by local configuration. Our proposed Markov process is different with the classical one, in which the transition probability is determined by the state labels related to the character of state. In the new quantum Markov process, the transition probability is determined not only by the state character, but also by the occupation of the state. Due to the probability occupation of the state, the classical relation (...) between the probability and condition probability at different times is no more valid. We have formulated the chain relation of successive transition for transition probability of the quantum Markov process instead of classical Chapman–Kolmogorov equation. The master equation is valid only in a classical Markov process. We have derived Euler-Lagrange equation in operator form as a characteristic equation of motion for the evolution of particle states as a Markov process. (shrink)

In western philosophy and beyond, a tension between pluralism and monism has sparked many developments and debates. Pluralism of norms, of forms of knowledge, of aesthetic and moral values, of interests etc. has often been pitted against monism. Monism usually implies a hierarchical order of such norms etc. After having traced the origin of this tension between pluralism and monism in ancient tragedy and philosophy, I’m asking in this article whether a rejection of monism and embrace of pluralism necessarily raises (...) the specter of inconsistency and contradiction. The threat of inconsistency need not be associated with pluralism as even with regard to logic an argument can be made for a ‘multiplicity of logics’, as van Lambalgen and Stenning argue in several places. They refer to the varieties in reasoning that can be observed in humans and which are partly due to there being ‘dual systems’ of reasoning: System 1 processes information fast, automatized, and emotional, while System 2 is rather slow, more deliberative, and more rational. In contrast to a widely held view, the authors argue that System 1 processing is not without logic, even though it is a different form of logic from System 2. In addition, the multiplicity of logics they discuss is related to the multiple semantics required for distinct domains of reasoning. This perspective raises the subsequent question how this pluralism can be available while maintaining consistency, how should the available options be configured or related to each other? In the remainer of this chapter I’m addressing several such options for configurating pluralism like: non-foundational pluralism and foundational pluralism, moderate or temporary pluralism, antagonistic pluralism, incompatible pluralism, incommensurable pluralism, ‘Anything goes’ pluralism, complementary pluralism, integrative pluralism, and interactive pluralism. The discussion and examples of these options show that irrespective of its domain, the encounter with different configurations of pluralism shows how some forms of pluralism are likely to be productive, whereas others are less so - which is an important lesson given the prominent pluralism of pluralisms in philosophy and beyond. (shrink)

The article presents a conceptual framework for distinguishing different sorts of heterogeneous digital materials. The hypothesis is that a wide range of heterogeneous data resources can be characterized and classified due to their particular configurations of hypertext features such as scripts, links, interactive processes, and time scalings, and that the hypertext configuration is a major but not sole source of the messiness of big data. The notion of hypertext will be revalidated, placed at the center of the interpretation of networked (...) digital media, and used in the analysis of the fast-growing amounts of heterogeneous digital collections, assemblages, and corpora. The introduction summarizes the wider background of a fast-changing data landscape. (shrink)

Based on two case studies of the design of electronic communication networks developed in the public and private sector, this article explores the barriers within current design cultures to account for the needs and diversity of users. Whereas the constraints on user-centered design are usually described in macrosociological terms, in which the user–technology relation is merely understood as a process of the inclusion or exclusion of users in design, the authors suggest that it is important to adopt a semiotic approach. (...) Moreover, they argue that we need to take into account the gender identity of designers to understand how design practices in ICT prioritize male users. The article shows how configuring the user as “everybody” and the use of the “I-methodology” are important constraints in the development of technologies that aim to reach users in all their diversity. (shrink)

In this paper, we make explicit the changing configurations of power relations that currently characterize the Brazilian Emergency Care System (SAMU) team in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The SAMU is a recent innovation in Brazilian healthcare service delivery. A qualitative case study methodology was used to explore SAMU’s current organizational arrangements, specifically the power relations that have developed and that demonstrate internal team struggles over space and defense of particular occupational interests. The argument advanced in this paper is that these professionals (...) are developing their work in conditions of exposure, that is, they are always being observed by someone, and that such observational exposure provides the conditions whereby everyday emergency care practices are enacted such that practice is shaped by, as well as shapes, particular, yet recognizable power relationships. Data were collected through the observation of the SAMU’s work processes and through semi‐structured interviews. Research materials were analyzed using discourse analysis. In the emergency care process of work, visibility is actually embedded in the disciplinary context and can thus be analyzed as a technique applied to produce disciplined individuals through the simple mechanisms elaborated by Foucault such as hierarchical surveillance, normalizing judgment, and the examination. (shrink)

How can we make complexity work as part of a programme of engaged social science? This article attempts to answer that question by arguing that one way to do this is through a reconstruction of a central tool of a distinctively social science – the comparative method – understood as a procedure for elucidating the complex and multiple systems of causation that generate particular trajectories towards a desired future from the multiple sets of available futures. The article distinguishes between ‘simplistic (...) complexity’ and ‘complex complexity’. ‘Simplistic complexity’ seeks to explain emergence in complex systems as the product of simple rules and defines complex science as the process of establishing such rules. It can and does serve as the basis of technocratic social engineering in the interest of the powerful. In contrast ‘complex complexity’ recognizes the significance of social structure and willed social agency and does not reduce emergence to the mere working out of a restricted set of rules. Research programmes informed by this second approach must necessarily engage with social actors in context – they must be dialogical. This opens up the possibility of ‘complex complexity’ as a frame of reference for action-research directed towards the transformation of complex social systems. Comparative methods, and in particular Ragin’s qualitative comparative analysis approach, when deployed as part of such a programme, can provide meaningful information about the range of possible futures and the different configurations of causes which might generate particular desired social outcomes. (shrink)

The creation of life has always spurred literary and cinematic productivity. Due to scientific progress in the fields of microbiology and genetics, countless novels and films today reflect the idea of human cloning more than other ideas. While the clone is often seen as the epitome of the posthuman, contemporary texts and films tend to modify the concept and humanize the clone. It can be said that fictional literature and films play a pivotal role in the construction, modification, and circulation (...) of concepts. Based on a cognitive linguistic concept of concept, the clone will be analyzed as an epistemic object. Focusing on conceptual processes of the configuration of knowledge, this article will show how the process of conceptualization works in literary texts and films and describe the techniques by which categories and concepts are constantly modified. Thus, it will be argued that literature and film play an active part in shaping a society's stock of knowledge. (shrink)

This is a peer reviewed chapter in the book The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The chapter, ‘The configurational encounter and the problematic of beholding’, is in Part I of the book, entitled ‘Taste and Art’. Engaging the aesthetics of reception as its field of inquiry, the chapter draws upon the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’ as a staged suspension of (...) connectivity, arguing for a reassignment of the aesthetic in terms of a ‘configurational encounter’ that problematizes the work/beholder relation. This constitutes a rare attempt to apply reception aesthetics to contemporary art, a ‘gap’ first highlighted by the art historian Michael Ann Holly in her 2002 article ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, published in A Companion to Art Theory. Utilising concrete examples of practice, the chapter asks whether the shift towards inter- or transmedia art practices, characterising postconceptual art, renders Bourdieu’s characterisation of the ‘autonomous’ artwork superfluous to the contemporary situation, and whether the kinds of judgments of taste associated with the acquisition of cultural capital are no longer relevant. The chapter argues that in revealing material processes, rules, instructions or appropriations – and/or its situated reception and apparatus of display – the configurational encounter problematizes the beholder’s bodily and ideological orientation toward an artwork, revealing our embodied dispositions or ‘habitus’. This counters philosopher Peter Osborne’s suggestion that a change in art’s ‘ontology’ post 1960s renders questions of aesthetics obsolete and reconceives the aesthetic as emerging from the oscillation of spatial and ideational perspective switches resulting from a calculated problematizing of the beholder’s position-taking. (shrink)

L'idée que la concentration géographique est essentielle au processus d'innovation est largement admise. Or, ce lien n'est pas clairement établi et il convient de réinterroger les relations entre communication, localisation et processus d'innovation. Cet article s'attache à le faire en privilégiant une entrée par les dynamiques de proximité, c'est-à-dire par la question de la coordination des acteurs. Nous identifions dans un premier temps le rôle de la proximité entre les différentes parties prenantes du processus d'innovation. Nous proposons ensuite une typologie (...) de la diversité des configurations spatiales de l'innovation en tenant compte du jeu dynamique des proximités.The idea that geographic concentration is essential to the process of innovation is widely recognized. However, this relationship is not clear and should re-examine the relationship between communication, location and process innovation. This article attempts to do so by favoring entry dynamics proximity, that is to say, by the issue of coordination of the actors. We identify firstly the role of proximity between the various stakeholders in the innovation process. We then propose a typology of the diversity of spatial patterns of innovation taking into account the dynamic interplay of proximity. (shrink)

The ability to integrate information from diverse texts and to detect logical implications of the integrated information is fundamental to the understanding process. This paper shows that identifying and configuring relevant facts in order to support hypothesized inferences is extremely difficult unless the facts have been committed to memory. Simply reading relevant texts for familiarization and then referring to them as needed provides an inadequate basis for deductive logic. Further, apprehension of the logical configuration of fads underlying a particular inference (...) can be an essentially automatic process for the reasoner who has structured the facts appropriately in memory. A model of search and memory mechanisms is proposed. It accounts for accuracy and reaction time data, as well as individual differences in inference evaluation. The implications of the superiority of memorization over familiarization‐plus‐referencing as a basis for learning and reasoning are discussed. (shrink)

The ability to integrate information from diverse texts and to detect logical implications of the integrated information is fundamental to the understanding process. This paper shows that identifying and configuring relevant facts in order to support hypothesized inferences is extremely difficult unless the facts have been committed to memory. Simply reading relevant texts for familiarization and then referring to them as needed provides an inadequate basis for deductive logic. Further, apprehension of the logical configuration of fads underlying a particular inference (...) can be an essentially automatic process for the reasoner who has structured the facts appropriately in memory. A model of search and memory mechanisms is proposed. It accounts for accuracy and reaction time data, as well as individual differences in inference evaluation. The implications of the superiority of memorization over familiarization‐plus‐referencing as a basis for learning and reasoning are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a theory of living organisms that captures the insights of both traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism and John Dupré's “biological processualism”. Like traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism, the proposed theory understands material objects to be comprised of both matter and form. Unlike contemporary structural varieties of hylomorphism, however, it does not understand the form of a material object to be a relation, configuration, or structure exhibited by its parts but an activity or process in which its matter is continuously (...) engaged. Following Mark Steen, I call the proposed theory “Hyloenergeism”. As a version of hylomorphism, hyloenergeism better captures the inherent dynamism of living organisms than contemporary structural approaches. And it does so not by abandoning the substantialist paradigm, as Dupré's biological processualism does, but by reconceptualizing the nature of material substances as possessing a processual core. Hyloenergeism, then, paves a middle way for those looking for a substance view of living organisms sensitive to the concerns raised by contemporary processualist philosophers of biology. (shrink)

This paper intends to illustrate the monuments of the Periklean building programme as embodying acts of temporal configuration; organizing synoptic episodes into an ethno-cultural continuum. A required element to this process is the issue of space, both in its experienced and imagined aspects, as the framework by which temporality is fixed and recounted. By viewing the monuments and accompanying iconography as spatio-temporal configurations, we can see the generation of those elements necessary for the formation of cultural identity via memory. This (...) includes the provision of axial points in time, set in space and wider temporal chronologies, and the election of totemic, and semioticized personages. Moreover, as the configurative action is both framed and informed by its enunciative context, the monuments indicate the promotion of biographical memory, as relating to the Persian Wars, into the register of Athenian cultural memory and temporality. (shrink)

This investigation draws from research on negative polarity item (NPI) illusions in order to explore a new and interesting instance of misalignment observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative markers. Previous research has shown that unlicensed NPIs can be perceived as acceptable when occurring soon after a structurally inaccessible negation (e.g. ever in *The bills that no senators voted for have ever become law). Here we examine the opposite configuration: grammatical sentences created by substituting the NPI ever with the negative (...) adverb never (e.g. The bills that no senators voted for have never become law). The processing and acceptability of these sentences was studied using three tasks: a speeded acceptability judgment (experiment 1), a self-paced reading task (experiment 2), and an offline acceptability rating (experiment 3). The results are consistent across measures in showing that the integration of the adverb never is disrupted by the linearly preceding but structurally inaccessible negative quantifier no in the relative clause. In our view, this pattern of results is in line with Parker and Phillips’ (2016) proposal that NPI illusions arise when the context containing the inaccessible negation has not been fully encoded by the time the NPI ever is encountered, making the embedded negative quantifier transparently available as a licensor. In a similar vein, the disruption effects observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative elements could arise if the negative quantifier is still being integrated when never is encountered, forcing the parser to deal with two negative elements simultaneously. This interpretation suggests that the same incomplete encodings that could be ameliorating the online perception of unlicensed NPIs could also be responsible for deteriorating the perception of the sentences under investigation here. This would represent an illusion of ungrammaticality. Furthermore, these results provide evidence against the speculation that NPI illusions are the consequence of misrepresenting ever as its near neighbor never, given that continuations with never are judged as unacceptable in spite of their grammaticality. Together, these findings inform the landscape of hypotheses on NPI illusions and offer valuable insights on the complexity of multiple negation and the relation between processing difficulty and acceptability. (shrink)

This paper offers a historical analysis of contemporary practices of shopping for vegetables in the highly dynamic context of urban Hanoi during the period from 1975 to 2014. Focusing on everyday shopping practices from a food safety perspective, we assess the extent to which the policy-enforced process of supermarketization has proven to be an engine of change in daily vegetable purchasing while improving food safety. In depicting transitions in shopping practices, we combine a social practices approach with historical analysis. Providing (...) a historical analysis of a broad and complex spectrum of everyday practices of purchasing fresh vegetables, we identify the key drivers of change. We discuss different modalities of shopping and demonstrate that no single retail modernization format can be said to exist. Rather than contrasting an idealized supermarket model with the traditional modalities of food shopping, we offer a varied, more diverse set of shopping practices that displays different strategies for coping with food safety issues. When discussed from a historical perspective, food practices are shown to be highly dynamic, being constantly reinvented and reconfigured by consumers who use their established skills, routines, and social networks to sometimes resist top-down enforced supermarketization while developing the coping strategies that best suit their local circumstances. (shrink)

This study investigates the connection between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate reputation among the public using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). To examine complex processes underlying the reactions of this influential stakeholder group, hypotheses are drawn from the category diagnosticity approach. Thereby, a psychological model of perceived (im)morality is transferred to the CSR context. In line with these hypotheses, positive/negative CSR activities influence reputation in the expected directions (H1a, b), while the effects of specific configurations of CSR activities (...) reveal an asymmetry suggesting a negativity bias (H2). Further analyses confirm that positive effects require a consistent positive performance regarding prior reputations (H3a) and the aggregated CSR activities of several previous years (H3b, c). Moreover, the relevant patterns vary between industries (H4). The present study thus contributes to CSR research by investigating a powerful but hitherto understudied stakeholder group through a category diagnosticity lens combined with a configurational approach to analysis. (shrink)

This article maintains that a new wave in the development of the productive forces of society triggered by the revolution in information and communication technologies is taking place. Production carried out by single organizations is increasingly replaced by forms of production that are based on close long-term collaboration between specialized firms. This transition reflects the increasing importance of research and development as well as collective learning in business competition. New information and communication technologies enable new forms of distributed and collaborative (...) knowledge creation and learning. The article explores an emerging new form of innovation-oriented inter-firm collaboration called co-configuration and the new kind of dualistic agency it seems to be calling for. In this form of collaboration the traditional boundary between producer and provider as well as the boundaries between product development, sales and maintenance within the provider organization become blurred. The article presents a case of the development of co-configuration work in the provision of optimization software for pulp production. The case shows some of the contradictions involved in this new form of collaboration and the development of a new kind of object-oriented collaborative agency mediated through a real-time information and communication technological platform and uniting two processes of continuous development. (shrink)

We draw from resource dependence and institutional theories to explore how board characteristics associated with directors’ capacities to provide resources and legitimacy (i.e., board size, the number of non-executive, interlocking, and female directors) along with regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutional conditions combine to shape firm environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Using a process of configurational theorizing with fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis and data from firms in 32 countries, we identify multiple equifinal configurations that are associated with high and (...) low ESG performance. We find that high and low ESG performance have different drivers due to complementarities among the presence and absence of board characteristics. Our results also show that the effectiveness (or not) of the bundles of boards’ characteristics for ESG performance varies across institutional contexts. By leveraging these findings to construct a typology of board archetypes that lead to high and low ESG performance, we offer novel theoretical and empirical insights to scholars as well as implications for practice. (shrink)

Human faces are one of the most prominent stimuli in the visual environment of young infants and convey critical information for the development of social cognition. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mask wearing has become a common practice outside the home environment. With masks covering nose and mouth regions, the facial cues available to the infant are impoverished. The impact of these changes on development is unknown but is critical to debates around mask mandates in early childhood settings. As infants grow, (...) they increasingly interact with a broader range of familiar and unfamiliar people outside the home; in these settings, mask wearing could possibly influence social development. In order to generate hypotheses about the effects of mask wearing on infant social development, in the present work, we systematically review N = 129 studies selected based on the most recent PRISMA guidelines providing a state-of-the-art framework of behavioral studies investigating face processing in early infancy. We focused on identifying sensitive periods during which being exposed to specific facial features or to the entire face configuration has been found to be important for the development of perceptive and socio-communicative skills. For perceptive skills, infants gradually learn to analyze the eyes or the gaze direction within the context of the entire face configuration. This contributes to identity recognition as well as emotional expression discrimination. For socio-communicative skills, direct gaze and emotional facial expressions are crucial for attention engagement while eye-gaze cuing is important for joint attention. Moreover, attention to the mouth is particularly relevant for speech learning. We discuss possible implications of the exposure to masked faces for developmental needs and functions. Providing groundwork for further research, we encourage the investigation of the consequences of mask wearing for infants’ perceptive and socio-communicative development, suggesting new directions within the research field. (shrink)

The social science literature on identity politics around questions of race and ethnicity is profuse, prolix and contentious. Indigenous identity politics have seen a parallel growth and are equally complex. While there are analogies and overlaps, indigenous identities and social movements are neither conceptually nor empirically a sub-set of ethnic identities. The central issue of indigenous groups is the place of first peoples in relation to the nation-state system. This takes different forms in old world states of Asia and Africa (...) to those of new world settler states of the Americas and Australasia. While the major issues of the indigenous peoples have expanded beyond their national boundaries, their modes of participation in the national political arenas vary. They share a gradual nationalization of indigenous movements, including stronger links with socio-political forces of the respective countries in the region, a heightened consciousness of global processes and the broadening and enrichment of their socio-cultural and economic objectives. This paper looks at trans-national dimensions of indigenous social movements and identity politics in relation to nation-state policy regimes and examines the varying routes taken by indigenous peoples to achieve their goals. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show (...) how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life. (shrink)

The axiological question of the role of economic values in the configuration of science is analyzed here following several steps: 1) the acceptance of the presence of values in science (among them, economic values in connection with scientific progress); 2) the clarification of the realms of values in science, which gives room for an "economics of science"; 3) the analysis of economic values in the internal perspective (cognitive and methodological), which is called "economy of research"; 4) the examination of external (...) economic values of science as social activity and in the uses and applications of science; and 5) the assessment of the possibility of an "economic axiology of science" (i.e., the articulation of economic values as a system where economic dimension of rationality should have an important task). The paper seeks an alternative vision to those already available, insofar as it is looking for new aspects of economic values, such as those involved in scientific results or outcomes, in addition to those considered in scientific aims and processes. (shrink)

When interpreting the meanings of visual features in information visualizations, observers have expectations about how visual features map onto concepts (inferred mappings.) In this study, we examined whether aspects of inferred mappings that have been previously identified for colormap data visualizations generalize to a different type of visualization, Venn diagrams. Venn diagrams offer an interesting test case because empirical evidence about the nature of inferred mappings for colormaps suggests that established conventions for Venn diagrams are counterintuitive. Venn diagrams represent classes (...) using overlapping circles and express logical relationships between those classes by shading out regions to encode the concept of non-existence, or none. We propose that people do not simply expect shading to signify non-existence, but rather they expect regions that appear as holes to signify non-existence (the hole hypothesis.) The appearance of a hole depends on perceptual properties in the diagram in relation to its background. Across three experiments, results supported the hole hypothesis, underscoring the importance of configural processing for interpreting the meanings of visual features in information visualizations. (shrink)

The laws of physics, because they are cast in terms of homogeneous variables, fall short of determining outcomes in heterogeneous biological systems that are capable of an immense number of combinatoric changes. The universal laws are not violated and they continue to constrain, but specification of results is accomplished instead by stable configurations of processes that develop in a nonrandom, but indeterminate manner. The indeterminacy of physical laws puts an end to Deist speculations and necessitates an alternative to the mechanical-reductionistic (...) metaphor for nature. An antithetical Heraclitan metaphysics, called ‘Process Ecology,’ entails a dialectic between centripetal creation and centrifugal decay in which nature, humanity and the Divine can all potentially participate. The dialectic can be quantified and tracked using information measures applied to networks of processes to allow for the statement and testing of falsifiable hypotheses. Creation no longer appears as an emergent enigma, but rather as a core phenomenon of Process Ecology that allows for free will, Divine intervention, intercessory prayer and a necessary tolerance for petty evil. No longer is ‘heat death’ the inevitable and only endpoint of the cosmos. Rather, the course of the universe may include as well the production of ‘perpetual harmonies’ akin to Teilhard’s ‘Omega Point.’. (shrink)

In the processing of subject-verb agreement, non-subject plural nouns following a singular subject sometimes “attract” the agreement with the verb, despite not being grammatically licensed to do so. This phenomenon generates agreement errors in production and an increased tendency to fail to notice such errors in comprehension, thereby providing a window into the representation of grammatical number in working memory during sentence processing. Research in this topic, however, is primarily done in related languages with similar agreement systems. In (...) order to increase the cross-linguistic coverage of the processing of agreement, we conducted a self-paced reading study in Modern Standard Arabic. We report robust agreement attraction errors in relative clauses, a configuration not particularly conducive to the generation of such errors for all possible lexicalizations. In particular, we examined the speed with which readers retrieve a subject controller for both grammatical and ungrammatical agreeing verbs in sentences where verbs are preceded by two NPs, one of which is a local non-subject NP that can act as a distractor for the successful resolution of subject-verb agreement. Our results suggest that the frequency of errors is modulated by the kind of plural formation strategy used on the attractor noun: nouns which form plurals by suffixation condition high rates of attraction, whereas nouns which form their plurals by internal vowel change (ablaut) generate lower rates of errors and reading-time attraction effects of smaller magnitudes. Furthermore, we show some evidence that these agreement attraction effects are mostly contained in the right tail of reaction time distributions. We also present modeling data in the ACT-R framework which supports a view of these ablauting patterns wherein they are differentially specified for number and evaluate the consequences of possible representations for theories of grammar and parsing. (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by atypical perception, including processing that is biased toward local details rather than global configurations. This bias may impact on memory. The present study examined the effect of this perception on both implicit and explicit memory in conditions that promote either local or global processing. The first experiment consisted of an object identification priming task using two distinct encoding conditions: one favoring local processing and the other favoring global processing of drawings. (...) The second experiment focused on episodic memory with two different cartoon recognition tasks that favored either local or a global processing. In addition, all the participants underwent a general clinical cognitive assessment aimed at documenting their cognitive profile and enabling correlational analyses with experimental memory tasks. Seventeen participants with ASD and 17 typically developing controls aged from 10 to 16 years participated to the first experiment and 13 ASD matched with 13 TD participants were included for the second experiment. Experiment 1 confirmed the preservation of priming effects in ASD but, unlike the Comparison group, the ASD group did not increase his performance as controls after a globally oriented processing. Experiment 2 revealed that local processing led to difficulties in discriminating lures from targets in a recognition task when both lures and targets shared common details. The correlation analysis revealed that these difficulties were associated with processing speed and inhibition. These preliminary results suggest that natural perceptual processes oriented toward local information in ASD may impact upon their implicit memory by preventing globally oriented processing in time-limited conditions and induce confusion between explicit memories that share common details. (shrink)

Many in science are disposed not to take biosemiotics seriously, dismissing it as too anthropomorphic. Furthermore, biosemiotic apologetics are cast in top-down fashion, thereby adding to widespread skepticism. An effective response might be to approach biosemiotics from the bottom up, but the foundational assumptions that support Enlightenment science make that avenue impossible. Considerations from ecosystem studies reveal, however, that those conventional assumptions, although once possessing great utilitarian value, have come to impede deeper understanding of living systems because they implicitly depict (...) the evolution of the universe backward. Ecological dynamics suggests instead a smaller set of countervailing postulates that allows evolution to play forward and sets the stage for tripartite causalities, signs, and interpreters—the key elements of biosemiosis—to emerge naturally out of the interaction of chance with configurations of autocatalytic processes. Biosemiosis thereby appears as a fully legitimate outgrowth of the new metaphysic and shows promise for becoming the supervenient focus of a deeper perspective on the phenomenon of life. (shrink)

This research concentrates on the design and analysis of an algorithm referred to as Virtual Network Configuration (VNC) which uses predicted future states of a system for faster network configuration and management. VNC is applied to the configuration of a wireless mobile ATM network. VNC is built on techniques from parallel discrete event simulation merged with constraints from real-time systems and applied to mobile ATM configuration and handoff. Configuration in a mobile network is a dynamic and continuous process. Factors such (...) as load, distance, capacity and topology are all constantly changing in a mobile environment. The VNC algorithm anticipates configuration changes and speeds the reconfiguration process by pre-computing and caching results. VNC propagates local prediction results throughout the VNC enhanced system. The Global Positioning System is an enabling technology for the use of VNC in mobile networks because it provides location information and accurate time for each node. This research has resulted in well defined structures for the encapsulation of physical processes within Logical Processes and a generic library for enhancing a system with VNC. Enhancing an existing system with VNC is straight forward assuming the existing physical processes do not have side effects. The benefit of prediction is gained at the cost of additional traffic and processing. This research includes an analysis of VNC and suggestions for optimization of the VNC algorithm and its parameters. (shrink)

On her arrival in Travancore in 1819 Mrs Mault, as wife of the new missionary, immediately set about establishing a school for convert girls and a ‘lace industry’ to employ convert women. Her actions reflect that pattern of activism and organization historians of gender and imperialism have identified as the ‘mission of domesticity’ conducted by European and North American Christian missionary women to their non-Christian ‘sisters’ in the colonial empires being established by their respective nation-states throughout the nineteenth century. Mrs (...) Mault was herself among the first generation of missionary women to pioneer this specifically female branch of colonizing endeavour, designed to ‘emancipate’ Indian women in terms of the norms of metropolitan ideologies of femininity and womanhood. Drawing on a case study of the London Missionary Society's activities in South Travancore, South India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that this ‘mission of domesticity’ was not a straightforward transfer of conventions of marriage and motherhood to the colonial context. On the contrary, the project was from the start caught in a complex and contradictory web of agency and discourse which ‘remade’ not only convert women but missionary women as well. Central to this process of refiguring femininity on the imperial fulcrum were changes to the meanings of ‘work’ in relation to both ‘home’ and womanhood, articulated through a religious idiom and framework of action. The consequences of these processes, the article argues, were somewhat contrary. On the one hand, the Indian Christian woman is reconstructed as a wife, mother and worker, while on the other, the missionary women are bifurcated: the missionary wife increasingly viewed as an amateur appendage to her husband, firmly secured in the domestic sphere, while the single woman attains a new status as a professional worker. (shrink)

We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the (...) animacy cue, we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth ( 2005 ) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. (shrink)

The de Broglie–Bohm interpretation is a no-collapse interpretation, which implies that we are in principle surrounded by empty waves generated by all particles of the universe, empty waves that will never collapse. It is common to establish an analogy between these pilot-waves and 3D radio-waves, which are nearly devoided of energy but carry nevertheless information to which we may have access after an amplification process. Here we show that this analogy is limited: if we consider empty waves in configuration space, (...) an effective collapse occurs when a detector clicks and the 3ND empty wave associated to a particle may not influence another particle (even if these two particles are identical, e.g. bosons as in the example considered here). (shrink)

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show (...) how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life. (shrink)

This article focuses on a specific political ethos of current developed societies, on what we call ‘self-service democracy’. The ethos essentially springs from the technologies, policies, structures and ideas promoting the ‘individualization trend’ in the provision of services as opposed to the allegedly passivizing system of the classical welfare state of the 1970s and the early 1980s. We review the conceptual history of self-service, its current core features, and the forms it has assumed in the political regimes of post-war Western (...) societies. The focus has moved from the services provided by the state to the activities and responsibility of individual citizens and organizations. Consumerist citizenship and personal responsibility, with the assistance of new information technologies, can open up novel channels for interaction and participation, but at the risk of rendering common political concerns into individual matters. The article investigates the political implications of this new emphasis on individualized, self-service-centred governance processes for democracy, and democratic participation and representation in particular. (shrink)

Long ago the Chinese people developed the habit of thinking in terms of images. They also formed the habit of writing and recognizing scriptforms in terms of images. In fact, these diverse cognitive processes - thinking, writing and decoding in terms of images - have been interacting and reinforcing one another for thousands of years, and, as a result, have played a significant role in shaping Chinese culture and the Chinese mind, and have become a part of the collective unconscious (...) of the people.Although today the Chinese characters are highly abstract and symbolic, the language still preserves its pictographic and ideographic prototypes, the parent script which evolved almost six thousand years ago. In other words, although modern Chinese characters are no longer actual drawings of objects, ideas, and images, they still have a blood relationship to these primitive forms. Their graphemes, configurations, or grapho-semantic radicals still bear direct semantic relation to their referents, so much so that it would be fair to describe the development of Chinese writing as an overlapping process as well as a gradual one. (shrink)

Sentences such as “The ship was sunk to collect the insurance” exhibit an unusual form of anaphora, implicit control, where neither anaphor nor antecedent is audible. The non-finite reason clause has an understood subject, PRO, that is anaphoric; here it may be understood as naming the agent of the event of the host clause. Yet since the host is a short passive, this agent is realized by no audible dependent. The putative antecedent to PRO is therefore implicit, which it normally (...) cannot be. What sorts of representations subserve the comprehension of this dependency? Here we present four self-paced reading time studies directed at this question. Previous work showed no processing cost for implicit vs. explicit control, and took this to support the view that PRO is linked syntactically to a silent argument in the passive. We challenge this conclusion by reporting that we also find no processing cost for remote implicit control, as in: “The ship was sunk. The reason was to collect the insurance.” Here the dependency crosses two independent sentences, and so cannot, we argue, be mediated by syntax. Our Experiments 1–4 examined the processing of both implicit (short passive) and explicit (active or long passive) control in both local and remote configurations. Experiments 3 and 4 added either “3 days ago” or “just in order” to the local conditions, to control for the distance between the passive and infinitival verbs, and for the predictability of the reason clause, respectively. We replicate the finding that implicit control does not impose an additional processing cost. But critically we show that remote control does not impose a processing cost either. Reading times at the reason clause were never slower when control was remote. In fact they were always faster. Thus, efficient processing of local implicit control cannot show that implicit control is mediated by syntax; nor, in turn, that there is a silent but grammatically active argument in passives. (shrink)

General Process Theory (GPT) is a new (non-Whiteheadian) process ontology. According to GPT the domains of scientific inquiry and everyday practice consist of configurations of ‘goings-on’ or ‘dynamics’ that can be technically defined as concrete, dynamic, non-particular individuals called general processes. The paper offers a brief introduction to GPT in order to provide ontological foundations for research programs such as interactivism that centrally rely on the notions of ‘process,’ ‘interaction,’ and ‘emergence.’ I begin with an analysis of our common sense (...) concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a general process. General processes are not individuated in terms of their location but in terms of ‘what they do,’ i.e., in terms of their dynamic relationships in the basic sense of one process being part of another. The formal framework of GPT is thus an extensional mereology, albeit a non-classical theory with a non-transitive part-relation. After a brief sketch of basic notions and strategies of the GPT-framework I show how the latter may be applied to distinguish between causal, mechanistic, functional, self-maintaining, and recursively self-maintaining interactions, all of which involve ‘emergent phenomena’ in various senses of the term. (shrink)

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been (...) interpreted as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. (shrink)

Among Pylyshyn's most important questions is determining the boundaries of early vision. A simple stimulus illustrates that, in addition to the dominant percept, most observers can perceive alternative interpretations of 3-D surface layout only after provided with suggestions. These observations may indicate that cognitive influences reach the stages of visual processing where 3-D surface configurations are resolved.