_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 1, pp 119 - 146 Masks are devices and symbols. In the first instance, they are artifacts that allow opposite poles to take each other’s place. They split the world into appearance and reality, manifest and repressed, sacred and profane. In this sense, they are dualistic. But by so doing they invert these terms. In this sense, they are dialectical. In the second instance, they exemplify doubt about people’s identities and the veracity of their words; (...) they denote duplicity, inauthenticity, and hypocrisy. The conjunction of these two senses resides in the fact that masks are at the threshold between reality and fiction. Such a threshold makes possible the emergence of a space of play which asserts that the world does not express a determinate and final order but is infinitely open to the emergence of new, yet transient, forms of self-organization and open new spatiotemporal worlds. (shrink)

RationaleThere are growing concerns over the occurrence of adverse physiologic events occurring in pilots during operation of United States Air Force and Navy high-performance aircraft. We hypothesize that a heightened inspiratory work of breathing experienced by jet pilots by virtue of the on-board life support system may constitute a “distraction stimulus” consequent to an increased sensation of respiratory muscle effort. As such, the purpose of this study was to determine whether increasing inspiratory muscle effort adversely impacts on attentional performance.MethodsTwelve, healthy (...) participants were recruited for this study. Participants completed six repetitions of a modified Masked Conjunctive Continuous Performance Task protocol while breathing against four different inspiratory threshold loads to assess median reaction times. A computer-controlled threshold loading device was used to set the inspiratory threshold loads. Repeated measures analysis of variances were performed to examine: the efficacy of the threshold loading device to impose significantly higher loading at each loading condition; the effects of loading condition on respiratory muscle effort sensation; and the influence of hypercapnia on MCCPT scores during inspiratory threshold loading. Generalized additive mixed effects models were used to examine the potential non-linear effects of respiratory muscular effort sensation, device loading, and hypercapnia, on MCCPT scores during inspiratory threshold loading.ResultsInspiratory threshold loading significantly augmented inspiratory effort sensation and the inspiratory pressure-time product. Our analyses also revealed that median hit RT was positively associated with inspiratory effort sensation during inspiratory loading trials.ConclusionThe findings of this work suggest that it was not increasing inspiratory muscle effort per se, but rather participant’s subjective perception of inspiratory “load” that impacts negatively on attentional performance; i.e., as the degree of inspiratory effort sensation increased, sotoo did median hit RT. As such, it is reasonable to suggest that minimizing inspiratory effort sensation during high-performance flight operations may prove useful in reducing pilot RTs during complex behavioral tasks. (shrink)

Strongly grounded in scientific knowledge, the instrument known as occupational exposure limits or threshold limit values has changed government modalities of exposure to hazardous chemicals in workplaces, transforming both the substance of the problem at hand and the power dynamics between the actors involved. Some of the characteristics of this instrument favor the interests of industries at the expense of employees, their representatives, and the authorities in charge of regulating these risks. First, this instrument can be analyzed as a (...) boundary object that has very different uses in space and time. In particular, it is increasingly masking its industrial origins to appear as an instrument that is almost exclusively based on scientific rationale. In the case of asbestos and its substitutes, the use of an instrument relying on scientific expertise generates a specific temporality of implementation that allows manufacturers to take advantage of periods during which regulations are either nonexistent or very loose. Finally, the choice of a technoscientific definition of the issues contributes to shifting the negotiations to a field where companies are in a position of strength and their opponents are weakened. (shrink)

The dominant view of the ventral and dorsal visual systems is that they subserve perception and action. De Wit, Van der Kamp, and Masters suggested that a more fundamental distinction might exist between the nature of information exploited by the systems. The present study distinguished between these accounts by asking participants to perform delayed matching , pointing and perceptual judgment responses to masked Müller–Lyer stimuli of varying length. Matching and pointing responses of participants who could not perceptually judge stimulus (...) length at brief durations remained sensitive to veridical stimulus length , but not the illusion , which was effective at long durations. Distinct thresholds for egocentric and allocentric information pick up were thus evident irrespective of whether perception or action responses were required. It was concluded that the dorsal and ventral systems may be delineated fundamentally by fast egocentric- and slower allocentric information pick up, respectively. (shrink)

The Objective Threshold/Strategic Model proposes that strong, qualitative inferences of unconscious perception can be made if the relationship between perceptual sensitivity and stimulus visibility is nonlinear and nonmonotonic. The model proposes a nadir in priming effects at the objective identification threshold . These predictions were tested with masked semantic priming and repetition priming of a lexical decision task. The visibility of the prime stimuli was systematically varied above and below the objective identification threshold. The obtained relationship (...) between prime visibility and priming facilitation was nonlinear, but the results failed to confirm a nadir in priming effects at the objective identification threshold. We conclude that the objective identification threshold does not necessarily indicate the point where presumably unconscious priming effects might be inhibited by conscious cognitive processes. (shrink)

Negative compatibility effects in the masked-prime paradigm are usually obtained when primes are masked effectively. With ineffective masks—and primes above the perceptual threshold—positive compatibility effects occur. We investigated whether this pattern reflects a causal relationship between conscious awareness and low-level motor control, or whether it reflects the fact that both are affected in the same way by changes in physical stimulus attributes. In a 5-session perceptual learning task, participants learned to consciously identify masked primes. However, they (...) showed unaltered NCEs that were not different from those produced by participants in a control group without equivalent perceptual learning. A control experiment demonstrated that no NCEs occur when prime identification is made possible by ineffective masking. The results suggest that perceptual awareness and low-level motor control are affected by the same factors, but are fundamentally independent of each other. (shrink)

Conscious access to fear-relevant information is mediated by threshold The present report proposed a model of access consciousness to fear-relevant information according to which there is a threshold for emotional perception beyond that the subject makes hits with no false alarm. The model was examined by having the participants performed a confidence-ratings masking task with fearful faces. Measures of the thresholds for conscious access were taken by looking at the receiver operating characteristics curves generated from a three-state low- (...) and high-threshold model by Krantz. Indeed, the analysis of the masking data revealed that the ROCs had threshold-like-nature rather continuous challenging in this fashion the classical signal-detection view on perceptual processing. Moreover, the threshold ROC curve exhibited the specific y-intercepts relevant to conscious access performance. The study suggests that the threshold can be an intrinsic property of conscious access, mediating emotional contents between perceptual states and consciousness. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert die Bedeutung der Idee der umma in der „Muslimischen Jugend in Deutschland e. V.“ und der sie umgebenden pop-islamischen Szene entlang der Frage sozialer Grenzziehungsprozesse. Es soll gezeigt werden, dass soziale Grenzen nicht nur durch Zuschreibungs- und Exklusionsprozesse von außen konstruiert, sondern auch entlang von gemeinschaftsbildenden Identifikationsprozessen junger Musliminnen und Muslime hergestellt werden. Indem individuelle und kollektive Bedeutungen der Umma im Kontext des Untersuchungsfeldes erfasst werden, werden Prozesse der Vergemeinschaftung ebenso in den Blick genommen wie (...) damit verbundene soziale Distinktionen, Exklusionen und Abwertungen. Dabei zeigt sich, dass soziale Grenzziehungsprozesse der pop-islamischen Szene sowohl gegenüber der deutschen Mehrheitsgesellschaft als auch gegenüber verschiedenen islamischen Strömungen je situations- und kontextabhängig ausgehandelt werden und sich als gleichzeitige Suche nach Partizipation und Abgrenzung bzw. Inklusion und Exklusion beschreiben lassen. (shrink)

In order to identify the neural correlates of consciousness it is necessary to distinguish these from the neural correlates associated with unconscious information processing. We describe the various techniques, such as masking, which can be used to generate conditions in which the same stimulus is presented either just above or just below a threshold for visibility. Directed attention can also be used to manipulate the extent to which a stimulus gains access to awareness, as can various methods for creating (...) bi‐stable perception. A major problem for these studies is the possible confound of the need for participants to report their awareness and there is currently much interest in developing paradigms in which reporting awareness is not required. We also discuss studies exploring the neural correlates of imagination, illusions and hallucinations in which a perceptual experience occurs in the absence of a physical stimulus. Finally we consider techniques that go beyond correlation and attempt to identify the necessary and sufficient neural processes leading to conscious experience. (shrink)

An extended examination of Libet's works led to a comprehensive reinterpretation of his results. According to this reinterpretation, the Minimum Train Duration of electrical brain stimulation should be considered as the time needed to create a brain stimulus efficient for producing conscious sensation and not as a basis for inferring the latency for conscious sensation of peripheral origin. Latency for conscious sensation with brain stimulation may occurafterthe Minimum Train Duration. Backward masking with cortical stimuli suggests a 125-300 ms minimum value (...) for the latency for conscious sensation of threshold skin stimuli. Backward enhancement is not suitable for inferring this latency. For determining temporal relations between stimuli that correspond to subjects' reports, theendof cerebral Minimum Train Duration should be used as reference, rather than its onset. Results of coupling peripheral and cortical stimuli are explained by a latency after the cortical Minimum Train Duration, having roughly the same duration as the latency for supraliminal skin stimuli. Results of coupling peripheral stimuli and stimuli to medial lemniscus (LM) are explained by a shorter LM latency and/or a longer peripheral latency. This interpretation suggests a 230 ms minimum value for the latency for conscious sensation of somatosensory near-threshold stimuli. The backward referral hypothesis, as formulated by Libet, should not be retained. Long readiness potentials preceding spontaneous conscious or nonconscious movements suggest that both kinds of movement are nonconsciously initiated. The validity of Libet's measures of W and M moments (Libet et al., 1983a) is questionable due to problems involving latencies, training, and introspective distinction of W and M. Veto of intended actions may be initially nonconscious but dependent on conscious awareness. (shrink)

A series of five experiments investigated the extent of subliminal processing of negation. Participants were presented with a subliminal instruction to either pick or not pick an accompanying noun, followed by a choice of two nouns. By employing subjective measures to determine individual thresholds of subliminal priming, the results of these studies indicated that participants were able to identify the correct noun of the pair – even when the correct noun was specified by negation. Furthermore, using a grey-scale contrast method (...) of masking, Experiment 5 confirmed that these priming effects were evidenced in the absence of partial awareness, and without the effect being attributed to the retrieval of stimulus–response links established during conscious rehearsal. (shrink)

Perceptual conscious experiences result from non-conscious processes that precede them. We document a new characteristic of the cognitive system: the speed with which visual meaningful stimuli are prioritized to consciousness over competing noise in visual masking paradigms. In ten experiments (N = 399) we find that an individual's non-conscious visual prioritization speed (NVPS) is ubiquitous across a wide variety of stimuli, and generalizes across visual masks, suppression tasks, and time. We also find that variation in NVPS is unique, in that (...) it cannot be explained by variation in general speed, perceptual decision thresholds, short-term visual memory, or three networks of attention (alerting, orienting and executive). Finally, we find that NVPS is correlated with subjective measures of sensitivity, as they are measured by the Highly Sensitive Person scale. We conclude by discussing the implications of variance in NVPS for understanding individual variance in behavior and the neural substrates of consciousness. (shrink)

Lip reading is the ability to partially understand speech by looking at the speaker's lips. It improves the intelligibility of speech in noise when audio-visual perception is compared with audio-only perception. A recent set of experiments showed that seeing the speaker's lips also enhances sensitivity to acoustic information, decreasing the auditory detection threshold of speech embedded in noise [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 109 (2001) 2272; J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 108 (2000) 1197]. However, detection is different from comprehension, and it (...) remains to be seen whether improved sensitivity also results in an intelligibility gain in audio-visual speech perception. In this work, we use an original paradigm to show that seeing the speaker's lips enables the listener to hear better and hence to understand better. The audio-visual stimuli used here could not be differentiated by lip reading per se since they contained exactly the same lip gesture matched with different compatible speech sounds. Nevertheless, the noise-masked stimuli were more intelligible in the audio-visual condition than in the audio-only condition due to the contribution of visual information to the extraction of acoustic cues. Replacing the lip gesture by a non-speech visual input with exactly the same time course, providing the same temporal cues for extraction, removed the intelligibility benefit. This early contribution to audio-visual speech identification is discussed in relationships with recent neurophysiological data on audio-visual perception. (shrink)

Emotion modulates our time perception. So far, the relationship between emotion and time perception has been examined with visible emotional stimuli. The present study investigated whether invisible emotional stimuli affected time perception. Using continuous flash suppression, which is a kind of dynamic interocular masking, supra-threshold emotional pictures were masked or unmasked depending on whether the retinal position of continuous flashes on one eye was consistent with that of the pictures on the other eye. Observers were asked to reproduce (...) the perceived duration of a frame stimulus that was concurrently presented with a masked or unmasked emotional picture. As a result, negative emotional stimuli elongated the perceived duration of the frame stimulus in comparison with positive and neutral emotional stimuli, regardless of the visibility of emotional pictures. These results suggest that negative emotion unconsciously accelerates an internal clock, altering time perception. (shrink)

The world, as a unifying nexus of significance, is inherently precarious and constitutively destined toward its own unraveling. Our fascination with a future end of the world masks our realization that the world as common and unified totality is already disintegrating. What remains after the end of the world is also what pre-cedes it, the geomaterial elements, which condition the world without being reducible to things within it. Through our participation in elemental materiality, we encounter the abyssal vertigo of deep (...) time as an anachronistic rupture of lived and historical time. The geological memory of stone situates it at the threshold of world and non-world, while our liability to an immemorial prehistory situates us at the intersection of incommensurable durations, those of the ancestral past as well as the apocalyptic future.El mundo, como un nexo de significado unificador, es intrínsecamente precario y está constitutivamente destinado a su propio desenredo. Nuestra fascinación por un futuro final del mundo enmascara nuestra comprensión de que el mundo como totalidad común y unificada ya se está desintegrando. Lo que queda después del fin del mundo es también lo que lo precede, los elementos geomateriales, que condicionan el mundo sin ser reducibles a las cosas dentro de él. A través de nuestra participación en la materialidad elemental, nos encontramos con el vértigo abismal del tiempo profundo como una ruptura anacrónica del tiempo vivido e histórico. La memoria geológica de la piedra lo sitúa en el umbral del mundo y del no mundo, mientras que nuestra responsabilidad ante una prehistoria inmemorial nos sitúa en la intersección de duraciones inconmensurables, tanto del pasado ancestral como del futuro apocalíptico. (shrink)

Three experiments examined the role of response criteria in a masked semantic priming paradigm using an exclusion task. Experiment 1 used on-line prime-report and exclusion instructions in which participants were told to avoid completing a word stem with a word related to a prime flashed for 0, 38 or 212 ms. Semantic priming was significant in the items analysis, but was moderated by peoples’ ability to report the prime in the participant analysis. Prime-report thresholds in Experiment 2 were made (...) more liberal by instructing participants to guess on every trial. Prime-report increased from Experiment 1 as exclusion failures were eliminated. Experiment 3 clarified the relationship between awareness and prime identification using an on-line measure of confidence and different liberal prime report instructions. The current findings suggest that the ability to act upon and report information in a masked prime is determined by a variable response criterion, which can be manipulated as an independent variable. (shrink)

Our visual systems account for stimulus context in brightness perception, but whether such adjustments occur for stimuli that we are unaware of has not been established. We therefore assessed whether stimulus context influences brightness processing by measuring unconscious priming with metacontrast masking. When a middle-gray disk was presented on a darker background, such that it could be consciously perceived as brighter via simultaneous brightness contrast , reaction times were significantly faster to a bright annulus than to a dark annulus. We (...) further show that context-dependent brightness priming does not correlate with visibility using an objective measure of awareness and that context-dependent, but not context-independent brightness priming, occurs equally strongly for stimuli below or above the subjective threshold for awareness . These results suggest that SBC occurs at early levels of visual input and is not influenced by conscious perception. (shrink)

Bringing Flowers HomeWe try to put a bandage on the wound,offering a vague apology:Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.Towers turn out to have been built on sand.Regimes collapse. No use in asking whywe ripped the bandage off that bleeding wound.An earthquake followed by a hurricane,fires, floods: they've passed some of us by.Us. And who is we? And what is home?Last week an enormous yellow moonhung low in a corner of the sky.Beauty is no bandage for the wound,hole in (...) the future much too big to mendor even to imagine, though we tryto camouflage it, bringing flowers home.You said, when we were talking of the end,that no one teaches us to say goodbye,or how to ease the bandage from the wound.Forgive me, death. I brought these flowers home.Moving the PianoCompact, gleaming, black and white,this sturdy Yamaha uprightstood staunchly in one room for yearsuntil, maneuvered through several doorstoday by two young slender menand up a ramp into their van,it ventured briefly out into the world again.The change of space, the space of change:the walls look naked, empty, strange.Heavy has given way to light.Habitual soliditytoo familiar to seeyields to possibilitytoo unfamiliar to see.Late and early, early, late,end, beginning—all are swirledinto a mist that veils the world.The black and white of status quoblends to a color I don't know,transition that I cannot name,but I salute it all the same.Goodbye, piano, and hello.So where is the piano going?Where will it find another life,music and memories unpackedin an unfolding second act?North Carolina, near a riverwhose stream, like time, is always flowing.My son lives there with his wife.Beloved, nothing is forever.You can't step twice into this life.Nap at Stony PointMy cousin and my friendon their respective recent deathbedsslid from my mind. I noticedthe scarlet splash of a cardinal perched on a cannonon a bluff above the Hudson.I lay down on a picnic table,sun on my face, five turkey vulturescircling overhead, and closed my eyes.And when I opened them I felt as pleasedas if I had completed some needful taskinstead of having forgottenhow my friend in January and my cousin in March,both of them alert and wry and tranquil,had faced what each of them clearly saw approaching—more, had recognized and greeted it,instead of ignoring it by looking through it,the way some people, even iftheir office is two doors down the hall,look right through you, pretending not to see you.Or maybe they don't see youany more than one envisions deathon a sunny April afternoon.The Last Lecture HallTheaters that were never ours,classrooms empty and refill.Nor do the trees belong to us.We cross the stage and disappearor venture in among the treesand lose ourselves there.Feverish categories blur.Genre distinctions: what for?The empty theater becomesa lecture hall. A classroom morphsinto a forest murmuringwith voices. Words pelt down like rainor rise like mist and dissipate.The rustling trees swell to a roar.But they were never still.Theater, classroom, maple, fir:feverish categories blur,presences pressing through the veilof the phenomenal;a leopard padding down the aisle.Tiger-masked students fill the seatsof the amphitheater.The old professor, looking outover the upturned faces, said“You are all allegoricalfigures to me. I will not learnyour names.” Did the students laugh?Tragedy, satire, comedy:genres are deciduous.Modes blur, leaves spin and fall.The leaves of memory seemed to makeA mournful rustling in the dark(Longfellow, “The Fire of Driftwood”).Lights go on in the theater.Class is over. We stumble out.The GatesWhen I woke up I had walked through a gate.I looked around the room—trickle or torrent, stepping into time—and bent my head to drink at a black stream.I look around a roomthick with the dust of after and before.Am I meant to drink from this black stream?My lips are dry,thick with the crust of after and before,gate of ivory and gate of horn.My lips are dry, I'm thirsty.Heat, cold, fire, snow, sun.Gate of ivory and gate of horn:to cross a threshold ends one story(firelight; snow squeaking; winter sun)and begins another.To cross a threshold ends one story(ever after? or a transformation?)and begins anotherthere is no law compelling us to enter.Ever after or a transformation.Torrent, trickle: we set foot in time,but there's no law compelling us to enterstory once we've latched the gate of dream.FilamentsYour past is thickening. You can seeits filaments, as carefullyyou begin to part the strands(they're all connected) with both hands,and clear a path. Now warilyenter the web—not all the way,but toward some kind of clarity.We have been rightly taught that wecan't finish, but must do, the work.Partway through the leafy murk,crisscrossing dapple of the trees,so tough and so precarious,you find yourself in the dawn air,the circle's center everywhere.Along the PromenadeReading a book about transitioningin the twenty-first-century meaning of the wordblends with plans for my son's upcoming weddingand scraps of conversation overheardat the Japanese-themed street fair today.Somnambulists along the promenadefloat in the warm currents of Broadway,eat talk look linger in the sun and shade.Then to the park: October leaves still green(climate change or merely Indian summer?).Snatched memories, I catch them on the wing:Samos Septembers, pomegranate tree,lemon tree, okra, a chameleon,the little summer of Saint Dimitri,they called it. All this happened; but to me?Streams of conversation flowing by.The sound artist described his work like this(if work is the right word): “Accidentallyuploading seemingly private messages,”which describes, also, dreams and poetry,the drifting crowd, incessant carousel,city and weather, time and holiday,all lived, palped, tasted, tested, overheard.Somnambulists along the promenadehave set up booths, their dreams... Bookending my dawn dream: symmetricalsoaking sponges dripping... DNA?Destiny, temperament, personality:the cards we're dealt and that we have to play,except we now can change them gradually.Transition: he or she or rather they,constructed, deconstructed, rearranged,the tarot spread of genealogy,inheritance as aleatoric play.We walked west to Eleventh Avenue,drawn by rumors of Ad Reinhardt's blue,which buzzed and throbbed. Stand still: my head was spinning.Allusions to water or to sky,dense, deep, alarming, ending or beginning... I sat awhile and watched the crowd glide by,enchanted promenaders all drawn inon the exhibition's last dayby the silence's cerulean humming.And then they climbed the stairs, and so did we,to lighter textures on an upper floorwhere Ruth Asawa's baskets in midairweightlessly demonstrated gravity,twigs, trees, crowns, bubbles dancing in white space.Next week my class will read “On Being Ill.”“Blogs,” I'll tell them, is the word we nowuse, not “essay,” for the moving mind,that saunterer who takes note and leaves behindand doubles back and ponders and regretsamidst the wash of vision, the flowand tidal pull of what we see and know,what we've dreamed, what we have said and heard,the thrumming colors and the floating crowd,as if the bubbly brew of sunny dayand anxious dreams could somehow all be caughtup in one enormous, one all-encompassing word. (shrink)

One aspect of auditory scenes that has received very little attention is the level of diffuseness of sound sources. This aspect has increasing importance due to growing use of amplification systems. When an auditory stimulus is amplified and presented over multiple, spatially-separated loudspeakers, the signal’s timbre is altered due to comb filtering. In a previous study we examined how increasing the diffuseness of the sound sources might affect listeners’ ability to recognize speech presented in different types of background noise. Listeners (...) performed similarly when both the target and the masker were presented via a similar number of loudspeakers. However, performance improved when the target was presented using a single speaker and the masker from three spatially separate speakers but worsened when the target was diffuse, and the masker was compact. In the current study, we extended our research to examine whether the effects of timbre changes with age and linguistic experience. Twenty-four older adults whose first language was English and 24 younger adults whose second language was English were asked to repeat non-sense sentences masked by either Noise, Babble, or Speech and their results were compared with those of the Young-EFLs previously tested. Participants were divided into two experimental groups: A Compact-Target group where the target sentences were presented over a single loudspeaker, while the masker was either presented over three loudspeakers or over a single loudspeaker; A Diffuse-Target group, where the target sentences were diffuse while the masker was either compact or diffuse. The results indicate that the Target Timbre has a negligible effect on thresholds when the timbre of the target matches the timbre of the masker in all three groups. When there is a timbre contrast between target and masker, thresholds are significantly lower when the target is compact than when it is diffuse for all three listening groups in a Noise background. However, while this difference is maintained for the Young and Old-EFLs when the masker is Babble or Speech, speech reception thresholds in the Young-ESL group tend to be equivalent for all four combinations of target and masker timbre. (shrink)

It seems likely that there is no threshold for the induction of cancer by ionising radiation. Hence even small radiation doses may result in a finite number of premature deaths if a large number of people are exposed. Various arguments are used to demonstrate that such deaths, if they occur, are acceptable; these arguments are shown to be flawed. Many of the arguments, and the ICRP's principle of justification, appear rooted in a utilitarian system of moral philosophy. Such a (...) system is superficially attractive as it appears objective and rational; however, the objectivity may be an illusion masking the underlying aims of the interested parties. (shrink)

We propose a fast and reliable corner detector that can detect corners under non-uniform illumination and fuzzy mineshaft images effectively. First, we presented an inner mask that used only four pixels to determine the flat and corner regions of an image, which could eliminate unnecessary computation of flat regions, thus reducing computing cost. Second, we separated the corner regions into background and foreground and computed the separate corner threshold to settle non-uniform illumination. Third, we proposed a fast corner-detection algorithm (...) to compute the nucleus continuous contributive segment based on the corner state. Finally, we proposed two effective methods to remove the false corners. Experimental results showed that our approach has a better detection quality and is less time consuming than three other algorithms on an artificial image, a noisy image, and non-uniform images and could meet the real-time requirement of mineshaft applications. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 335-342 [Access article in PDF] "Dispersing the Cogito: A Response to Vivian's Rhetorical Self" Philip Lewin Bradford Vivian ("The Threshold of the Self," Philosophy and Rhetoric 33. 4: 303-18), in seeking to disrupt the cogito, claims that acts of creative self-constitution by a "rhetorical self" become possible as subjectivity is dispersed across subject positions. However, the apparent ability of the rhetorical self to (...) freely choose which positions it will inhabit, as well as its apparent capacity to undergo subjectification without being marked by its habitation of those positions, seem to reintroduce several of the cogito's essential features.Vivian argues that "there is a historicity to our being and its expression, to our subjectivity and its elaboration" (303). His essay provides a clear and cogent account of how subjectivity might arise as the result of a series of rhetorical acts whose audience is the self. One's self, then, is a local and ongoing aesthetic formation, continually becoming and coming into being; to the extent that the aesthetic nature of this process is produced by persuading one's self to adopt some styles of life over others, then this process is a thoroughly persuasive phenomenon. The aesthetic composition molded by this continually renewed persuasion might best be described as the rhetorical self. (312; emphasis in original) Vivian clears away a good deal of the underbrush that often prevents us from getting a hold on the problematics of selfhood and subjectivity. I find much that is praiseworthy in the essay, particulary its explication of the contingent and shifting nature of the processes through which the self is formed and reformed. But there is a key theoretical elision in Vivian's argument that does much to restore the legitimacy of the Cartesian cogito that he is at pains to disrupt. The result is a model of self that revises Cartesianism by dispersing subjectivity among various subject positions, [End Page 335] but that, in a number of other important ways, preserves essential features of the cogito, as though each fragment of the dispersed cogito were itself a complete mini-cogito.Vivian's account elides the rhetorical process of self-formation. In a typical passage at the end of the essay, he comments, "In order to compose and cultivate one's being in the world, one must persuade one's self to choose and orchestrate certain styles of life from among those available into an entire aesthetics of being" (316-17). The questions this claim provokes are: How does this process of self-persuasion actually take place? What aspect or agency of psyche is doing the persuading? To conceive of the self as Vivian does--a self "conceived as a form--a rhetorical form--that exists only in its continual aesthetic creation, in its indefinite becoming" (304)--suggests a kind of autonomy and self-transparency in self-formation that has discouragingly Cartesian overtones.The terms with which Vivian has chosen to work, namely, subjectivity and the rhetorical self, do not address these issues of self-persuasion. Instead, they serve to mask them. Subjectivity, for Vivian, refers to the positions the self finds itself assuming within discursive regimes, positions whose formation entails moments both of self-persuasion and of subjection to existing social exigency. Subjectivity (so conceived) has the property of being an effect of multiple acts of subjectification, of voluntary acquiescence to preexisting subject positions. "Discourse creates subjects by first creating subject positions from which to speak" (313). The subject is not original, but rather follows from "an entire 'assemblage' of subject positions that are the willful creation of no one, but are instead formed by the complex operations of discourse" (313). The theoretical difficulty with this way of accounting for subjectivity lies in its elision of agency; how shall we make sense of the rhetorical self? More specifically, how does a necessary immersion into discursive practices couple with rhetorical acts of self-persuasion? What motivates self-persuasion? Are all the factors involved in self-persuasion fully conscious and under voluntary control? If not, how are we... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 335-342 [Access article in PDF] "Dispersing the Cogito: A Response to Vivian's Rhetorical Self" Philip Lewin Bradford Vivian ("The Threshold of the Self," Philosophy and Rhetoric 33. 4: 303-18), in seeking to disrupt the cogito, claims that acts of creative self-constitution by a "rhetorical self" become possible as subjectivity is dispersed across subject positions. However, the apparent ability of the rhetorical self to (...) freely choose which positions it will inhabit, as well as its apparent capacity to undergo subjectification without being marked by its habitation of those positions, seem to reintroduce several of the cogito's essential features.Vivian argues that "there is a historicity to our being and its expression, to our subjectivity and its elaboration" (303). His essay provides a clear and cogent account of how subjectivity might arise as the result of a series of rhetorical acts whose audience is the self. One's self, then, is a local and ongoing aesthetic formation, continually becoming and coming into being; to the extent that the aesthetic nature of this process is produced by persuading one's self to adopt some styles of life over others, then this process is a thoroughly persuasive phenomenon. The aesthetic composition molded by this continually renewed persuasion might best be described as the rhetorical self. (312; emphasis in original) Vivian clears away a good deal of the underbrush that often prevents us from getting a hold on the problematics of selfhood and subjectivity. I find much that is praiseworthy in the essay, particulary its explication of the contingent and shifting nature of the processes through which the self is formed and reformed. But there is a key theoretical elision in Vivian's argument that does much to restore the legitimacy of the Cartesian cogito that he is at pains to disrupt. The result is a model of self that revises Cartesianism by dispersing subjectivity among various subject positions, [End Page 335] but that, in a number of other important ways, preserves essential features of the cogito, as though each fragment of the dispersed cogito were itself a complete mini-cogito.Vivian's account elides the rhetorical process of self-formation. In a typical passage at the end of the essay, he comments, "In order to compose and cultivate one's being in the world, one must persuade one's self to choose and orchestrate certain styles of life from among those available into an entire aesthetics of being" (316-17). The questions this claim provokes are: How does this process of self-persuasion actually take place? What aspect or agency of psyche is doing the persuading? To conceive of the self as Vivian does--a self "conceived as a form--a rhetorical form--that exists only in its continual aesthetic creation, in its indefinite becoming" (304)--suggests a kind of autonomy and self-transparency in self-formation that has discouragingly Cartesian overtones.The terms with which Vivian has chosen to work, namely, subjectivity and the rhetorical self, do not address these issues of self-persuasion. Instead, they serve to mask them. Subjectivity, for Vivian, refers to the positions the self finds itself assuming within discursive regimes, positions whose formation entails moments both of self-persuasion and of subjection to existing social exigency. Subjectivity (so conceived) has the property of being an effect of multiple acts of subjectification, of voluntary acquiescence to preexisting subject positions. "Discourse creates subjects by first creating subject positions from which to speak" (313). The subject is not original, but rather follows from "an entire 'assemblage' of subject positions that are the willful creation of no one, but are instead formed by the complex operations of discourse" (313). The theoretical difficulty with this way of accounting for subjectivity lies in its elision of agency; how shall we make sense of the rhetorical self? More specifically, how does a necessary immersion into discursive practices couple with rhetorical acts of self-persuasion? What motivates self-persuasion? Are all the factors involved in self-persuasion fully conscious and under voluntary control? If not, how are we... (shrink)

Anxiety has been associated with enhanced unconscious processing of threat and attentional biases towards threat. Here, we focused on the phenomenology of perception in anxiety and examined whether threat-related material more readily enters anxious than non-anxious individuals’ awareness. In six experiments, we compared the stimulus exposures required for each anxiety group to become objectively or subjectively aware of masked facial stimuli varying in emotional expression. Crucially, target emotion was task irrelevant. We found that high trait-anxiety individuals required less sensory (...) evidence to become aware of the face targets. This anxiety-based difference was observed for fearful faces in all experiments, but with non-threat faces, it emerged only when these were presented among threatening faces. Our findings suggest a prominent role for affective context in high-anxiety individuals’ conscious perception of visual stimuli. Possible mechanisms underlying the influence of context in lowering awareness thresholds in anxious individuals are discussed. (shrink)

Background: The intrauterine hearing experience differs from the extrauterine hearing exposure within a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) setting. Also, the listening experience of a neonate drastically differs from that of an adult. Several studies have documented that the sound level within a NICU exceeds the recommended threshold by far, possibly related to hearing loss thereafter. The aim of this study was, firstly, to precisely define the dynamics of sounds within an incubator and, secondly, to give clinicians and caregivers (...) an idea about what can be heard “inside the box.” Methods: Audio recordings within an incubator were conducted at the Pediatric Simulation Center of the Medical University Vienna. They contained recorded music, speech and synthesized sounds. To understand the dynamics of sounds around and within the incubator the following stimuli were used: broadband noise with decreasing sound level in ten steps of 6 dB, sine waves (62.5, 125, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000 and 16000 Hz), logarithmic sweep (Chirp) over the frequency band 20 Hz to 21 kHz, singing male voice, singing and whispering female voice. Results: Our results confirm a protective effect of the incubator from noises above 500 Hz in conditions of “no-flow” and show almost no protective effect of an incubator cover. We, furthermore, observed a strong boost of low frequencies below 125 Hz within the incubator, as well as a notable increase of higher frequency noises with open access doors, a significant resonant effect of the incubator, and a considerable masking effect of the respiratory support against any other source of noise or sound stimulation even for “low-flow” conditions. Conclusion: Our study reveals high noise levels of air supply at high flow rates and the boost of low frequencies within the incubator. Education of medical staff and family members as well as modifications of the physical environment should aim at reducing noise exposure of preterm infants in the incubator. Audiovisual material is provided as supplementary material. (shrink)

At the core of conceptual understandings underlying a common-sense comprehension of matter is an assumed opposition of the intelligible and the sensible. Drawing on the writings of Giles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz, this essay attempts to rethink the relations of matter through the work of materiality in the context of art. Focusing on the installation COVERS, by Melbourne-based artist Fiona Abicare, this examination argues that a mobilization of the disordering effects of matter instigates an interval. In this passage (...) of undecidability an understanding of matter as a vehicle for expression or medium for signifying something external to itself is challenged via a ceaseless interchange across the thresholds of surface and depth, face and mask, ornament and decoration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 335-342 [Access article in PDF] "Dispersing the Cogito: A Response to Vivian's Rhetorical Self" Philip Lewin Bradford Vivian ("The Threshold of the Self," Philosophy and Rhetoric 33. 4: 303-18), in seeking to disrupt the cogito, claims that acts of creative self-constitution by a "rhetorical self" become possible as subjectivity is dispersed across subject positions. However, the apparent ability of the rhetorical self to (...) freely choose which positions it will inhabit, as well as its apparent capacity to undergo subjectification without being marked by its habitation of those positions, seem to reintroduce several of the cogito's essential features.Vivian argues that "there is a historicity to our being and its expression, to our subjectivity and its elaboration" (303). His essay provides a clear and cogent account of how subjectivity might arise as the result of a series of rhetorical acts whose audience is the self. One's self, then, is a local and ongoing aesthetic formation, continually becoming and coming into being; to the extent that the aesthetic nature of this process is produced by persuading one's self to adopt some styles of life over others, then this process is a thoroughly persuasive phenomenon. The aesthetic composition molded by this continually renewed persuasion might best be described as the rhetorical self. (312; emphasis in original) Vivian clears away a good deal of the underbrush that often prevents us from getting a hold on the problematics of selfhood and subjectivity. I find much that is praiseworthy in the essay, particulary its explication of the contingent and shifting nature of the processes through which the self is formed and reformed. But there is a key theoretical elision in Vivian's argument that does much to restore the legitimacy of the Cartesian cogito that he is at pains to disrupt. The result is a model of self that revises Cartesianism by dispersing subjectivity among various subject positions, [End Page 335] but that, in a number of other important ways, preserves essential features of the cogito, as though each fragment of the dispersed cogito were itself a complete mini-cogito.Vivian's account elides the rhetorical process of self-formation. In a typical passage at the end of the essay, he comments, "In order to compose and cultivate one's being in the world, one must persuade one's self to choose and orchestrate certain styles of life from among those available into an entire aesthetics of being" (316-17). The questions this claim provokes are: How does this process of self-persuasion actually take place? What aspect or agency of psyche is doing the persuading? To conceive of the self as Vivian does--a self "conceived as a form--a rhetorical form--that exists only in its continual aesthetic creation, in its indefinite becoming" (304)--suggests a kind of autonomy and self-transparency in self-formation that has discouragingly Cartesian overtones.The terms with which Vivian has chosen to work, namely, subjectivity and the rhetorical self, do not address these issues of self-persuasion. Instead, they serve to mask them. Subjectivity, for Vivian, refers to the positions the self finds itself assuming within discursive regimes, positions whose formation entails moments both of self-persuasion and of subjection to existing social exigency. Subjectivity (so conceived) has the property of being an effect of multiple acts of subjectification, of voluntary acquiescence to preexisting subject positions. "Discourse creates subjects by first creating subject positions from which to speak" (313). The subject is not original, but rather follows from "an entire 'assemblage' of subject positions that are the willful creation of no one, but are instead formed by the complex operations of discourse" (313). The theoretical difficulty with this way of accounting for subjectivity lies in its elision of agency; how shall we make sense of the rhetorical self? More specifically, how does a necessary immersion into discursive practices couple with rhetorical acts of self-persuasion? What motivates self-persuasion? Are all the factors involved in self-persuasion fully conscious and under voluntary control? If not, how are we... (shrink)

This study assessed whether real-life stimulus material can elicit conscious and unconscious priming. A typical masked priming paradigm was used, with brand logo primes. We used a rigorous method to assess participants’ awareness of the subliminal information. Our results show that shortly presented and masked brand logos have the power to prime their brand names and, remarkably, words associated to the brand . However, this only occurred when the logos could be categorized clearly above the consciousness threshold. (...) Once the primes were presented close to the consciousness threshold, no subliminal influences on behavior were observed. (shrink)

Comparisons of indirect measures with direct measures can help elucidate the relationship between nonconscious and conscious perception. We report three experiments on masked word priming in which we observed a negative correlation between prime discriminability and priming , i.e. where priming decreased with increasing prime visibility. While such observations are rare , they may indicate a conflict between conscious and nonconscious processing when primes are shown close to the subjective visibility threshold for the priming-relevant information. For instance, such (...) a conflict could occur between nonconscious processing of a prime’s meaning and conscious perception of prime letters. Theoretical accounts that discuss similar conflicts assume that the conflict is resolved either by automatically prioritising conscious processes or by discounting the estimated confusion caused by a prime-target pair . In both cases, priming is predicted to decrease when prime visibility increases from below threshold to perithreshold levels. Therefore, we suggest that negative priming-d’ relationships are most likely observed when the d’ measure assesses prime visibility at a level of representation that is below the level of representation at which priming arises, in terms of a putative hierarchy of word processing. (shrink)

"Meeting strangers" is a metaphor for the increasingly common experience of working with diversity in family therapy. This book offers a model of cultural family therapy for working with families across cultures, particularly immigrants, refugees, and minorities in mainstream society. -/- The author draws together several emerging trends in therapy and the human sciences: narrative approaches, transcultural psychiatry, studies of autobiographical memory and the distributed and saturated self, translation theory and sociolinguistics. He offers an understanding of the "situated nature" of (...) human problems and tools for translating the family's culture and idioms into a common language in a culturally responsive and collaborative way. -/- Each chapter is both theoretical and practical, far-reaching and grounded in the experiences of families in therapy. The chapters of Part I, Meeting Strangers, introduce themes of cultural family therapy, a synthesis of family therapy and transcultural psychiatry that reframes the presenting issue in therapy as the "presenting culture." Here DiNicola both critiques family therapy's unexamined use of cultural concepts and introduces fresh conceptual tools, such as spirals, masks, and roles, that facilitate the therapist's engagement with the family culture. -/- Part II, On the Threshold: Language, Identity, and Cultural Change, introduces a number of "changelings," "liminal people," and "orphans." Between or on the thresholds of two or more cultures, they struggle with issues around language and translation, identity and cultural change. The overbearing influence of Western concepts is seen in DiNicola's examination of the psychological, social, and cultural implications of the myth of independence. -/- Part III, Families as Storying Cultures, demonstrates in extended cases the power of narrative and of metaphor to transform experience. The final chapter is a moving memoir of the author's fascinating journey to Brazil to meet his father for the first time. -/- The author's aim is "to open space for people who have been treated like minor characters in the drama of family therapy." In doing so, he puts onto center stage all sorts of strangers in society, families of diversity, and their human predicaments, inviting his readers to engage in the full richness and complexity of culture, families, and therapy. (shrink)

The proposed work describes an approach for the segmentation of abnormal lung CT scans of COVID-19. Lung diseases are the leading killer in both men and women. The pulmonary experts normally make attempts, such as early detection of patients by tomography tests before lung specialists treat patients who are tortured by lung disease. Moreover, lung specialists do their best to detect the presence of lung conditions. X rays or CT scan checks are performed for tomography tests. The finest approach for (...) medical diagnosis and a wide range of uses is computed tomography. This kind of imaging offers elaborate cross-sectional pictures of skinny slices of the organic structure. However, the preprocessing and denoising methods of Lung CT scans may mask some important image features. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework involving an optimization technique algorithm to solve a multilevel thresholding problem based on information theory to segment abnormal lung CT scans. The proposed framework will evaluate a sample of CT scan images taken from a well-known benchmark database. The evaluation results will assess subjectively and objectively to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 459-460 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Brandt. Philosophie in Bildern: Von Giorgione bis Magritte. Hamburg: Dumont, 2000. Pp. 470. Paper, NP. Reinhard Brandt, professor for Philosophiegeschichte, offers in his latest book a multi-faceted history of philosophy and art through his detailed interpretations of major paintings in the European tradition, beginning with Giorgione's "The Three Philosophers" and a young Raphael's "The Dream (...) of the Knight,"and stretching to René Magritte's "La condition humaine." In these paintings, as Brandt claims, different philosophical positions are expounded, which he then, in the role of interpreter, attempts to elucidate.In the introduction Brandt explains how this paradoxical phenomenon of philosophizing paintings can even exist. That one can find not only philosophical themes but well-wrought positions in such paintings, and, most importantly, not read these positions into them, is shown in more than thirty short essays, spanning from ancient Greek philosophy and literature, through the Renaissance and on to present-day Italian, French, Spanish, and German literature/philosophy. In almost every interpretation, Brandt critically reviews previous research, exposing and correcting some deeply rooted mistakes and constantly providing new impulses; in light of his philosophical-philological method, some major paintings in the European tradition are interpreted anew.His detailed analysis of Raphael's "The School of Athens" forces a persuasive revision of previous interpretations; the sitting figure in the foreground is not, as previously assumed, Heraclitus, but Democritus. On account of this carefully proven and convincing allotment, an unnoticed field of vision is discovered between the materialist and solid-state physicist Democritus, who with the gestus melancholicus is concentrating on a problem, and Plato, standing perpendicularly over him. Could this problem be the stone cube, on which the philosopher is leaning? From this conjecture we now have a bridge leading to Albrecht Dürer's engraving "Melancholia."Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas" is interpreted anew on account of the surprising solution to the painting's puzzling construction. Brandt shows that the whole picture is viewed from the vantage point of the princess inside the painting, not of an observer outside it. The princess stands before a mirror and Velazquez paints everything exactly as the princess sees it. So the painting, which hangs in the Prado Museum, is the mirror image of a complete reflection of the Self; perhaps it is no coincidence that the painting belongs to the same historical period as Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum dictum. Or Jacques Louis David's "The Death of Socrates": although the painting has been correctly referred back to Plato's Phaidon, until now a Platonic ground position was falsely attributed to the painting. Brandt shows that the painting was conceived with Stoic philosophical positions in mind: death is portrayed as immanently present, coupled with the un-Socratic maxim mortem spernere. The virtuous stance that Socrates still shows on the threshold of death is decisive. And as an added bonus he includes his influential, previously published essay on the title-page emblem of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is Brandt's technical know-how. He combines an encyclopedic knowledge of the European intellectual tradition with a [End Page 459] fluid, easy-to-read style, which not only instructs the reader, but entertains as well. At no time does this book approach mere philosophical pedantry; his treatment of some of the lesser known, albeit important, figures in the history of philosophy, e.g., Justus Lipsius and Diogenes of Sinope, is not a lesson in obscurity. The reader feels himself taken on a journey through a history of Western philosophy, always being provided with thought-provoking material. His style, however, is in no way used to mask the often shaky scholarship that has a tendency to go hand-in-hand with such interdisciplinary studies. In every essay Brandt exhausts all the sources; he works with razor-sharp exactness, proceeding with the meticulousness of an outstanding and seasoned scholar.A problem which always accompanies such books is the question: Cui bono? Are either the philosophers... (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, 'masked man'. MM occurs due to our finite, limited knowledge of reality. It involves drawing unjustified conclusions about what is true based on intentional attitudes. MM is based on a failure to apply fully the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals. While the case of the masked man seems to be a clear fallacy, the case can be redescribed to offer a non‐fallacious inference. MM may be (...) avoided to the extent that we cultivate what many refer to as epistemic humility. We need to be aware of when our beliefs reflect our proper access to some state of affairs and when our beliefs are mediated through different lenses. We need to know our limitations when we make inferences based on partial information. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of thresholds in theories of distributive justice, there is no general account of what sort of role is played by the idea of a threshold within such theories. This has allowed an ongoing lack of clarity and misunderstanding around views that employ thresholds. In this article, I develop an account of the concept of thresholds in distributive justice. I argue that this concept contains three elements, which threshold views deploy when ranking possible distributions. These elements (...) are (i) the level of the threshold, (ii) what constitutes the value of the threshold, and (iii) how benefits above and below the threshold must be allocated. I highlight three contributions that this particular account of thresholds makes: it clarifies the nature of the shift that occurs at the threshold; it resolves a common misunderstanding about headcount principles; and it shows how the arbitrariness objection can be met. (shrink)