Phenomenology, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Pokémon Go</Emphasis>, and Other Augmented Reality Games

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects on the everyday world of actual Augmented Reality games which introduce digital objects in our surroundings from a phenomenological point of view. Augmented Reality is a new technology aiming to merge digital and real objects, and it is becoming pervasively used thanks to the application for mobile devices Pokémon Go by Niantic. We will study this game and other similar applications to shed light on their possible effects on our lives and on our everyday world from a phenomenological perspective. In the first part, we will show how these digital objects are visualised as merged in the surroundings. We will point out that even if they are visualised as part of the everyday world, they are not part of it because they are still related to the fictional world generated by the game. In the second part, we will show how the existence of these objects in their fictional world has effects on the everyday world where everybody lives. The goal of Augmented Reality is not reached yet because these objects are not part of the everyday world, but it already makes our lives embedded with digital elements. We will show if these new objects have effects on our world and on how we live our lives.     

Expertise and its embodiment: Examining the impact of sensorimotor skill expertise on the representation of action-related text

In two experiments, we explored how novice and expert athletes represent the everyday and sportspecific objects and actions that they read about. Novice and expert ice hockey players (Experiment 1) and football players (Experiment 2) read sentences describing everyday or sport-specific situations and then judged whether a pictured item (either matching the action implied in the previous sentence or not) was mentioned in the preceding sentence. The sentences in Experiment 1 consisted of everyday and hockey-specific scenarios. The sentences in Experiment 2 depicted football scenarios implying football-specific or non—football-specific actions anyone might perform. Everyone responded most quickly to items that matched the sentence-implied actions for everyday and non—sport-specific actions. Only athletes showed this effect for their respective sport-specific scenarios. Differentiating between the same item in different action orientations is thought to be driven by embodied knowledge containing the sensorimotor characteristics of what one is reading about. We show that possessing this type of representation depends on experience interacting with objects and performing the actions in question.     

Wayfinding with my iPhone: An autoethnographic account of technological companionship and its affects

Location-aware technologies such as GPS devices and smartphones are integral to everyday, mundane navigational practices or ‘wayfinding’. The personalisation, portability and popularity of these devices means that wayfinding can be accomplished with near-instant access to place-based information. But how do people connect to these devices in more intimate, emotional, and haptic ways? To address this question, this paper draws on autoethnographic fieldwork involving wayfinding devices, using a series of iPhone navigation apps. The paper presents a series of short narratives taken from my field diaries exploring the ways in which I perceived and performed my iPhone device as a companion during my everyday mobilities. The paper focuses on three mechanisms that facilitated relations of companionship: product design, sensory engagement and emotional/affective encounters. Building on these insights, the paper argues that relations of companionship with technological devices come into focus in particular moments when the life cycles of the users and their devices collide. The various emotions and affects, which circulate in these moments, are critical to how we make sense of space, place, and our mobilities, as well as ongoing engagements with human/technology relations.     

Variety Seeking,Satiation, and Maximizing Enjoyment Over Time

In this article, we examine the different ways in which consumers balance their consumption behavior in order to maximize utility. In particular, we focus on how people balance repeating the same options with the decision to seek variety. While earlier research represented variety seeking as a means of reducing physical satiation (McAlister, 1982), more recent research suggests that the relationship between choosing variety and minimizing satiation is more complex, as these behaviors may be motivated and influenced by exogenous factors. Past reviews have largely looked at the two processes separately. In this article, we discuss the nuanced relationship between these two constructs and point to future research directions that may help us further understand how consumers tackle the everyday challenge of maximizing enjoyment over time.     

Recognition-induced forgetting of faces in visual long-term memory

Despite more than a century of evidence that long-term memory for pictures and words are different, much of what we know about memory comes from studies using words. Recent research examining visual long-term memory has demonstrated that recognizing an object induces the forgetting of objects from the same category. This recognition-induced forgetting has been shown with a variety of everyday objects. However, unlike everyday objects, faces are objects of expertise. As a result, faces may be immune to recognition-induced forgetting. However, despite excellent memory for such stimuli, we found that faces were susceptible to recognition-induced forgetting. Our findings have implications for how models of human memory account for recognition-induced forgetting as well as represent objects of expertise and consequences for eyewitness testimony and the justice system.     

Souvenirs: Magical objects in everyday life

This article considers the role of souvenirs within domestic spaces. Souvenirs are ambivalent objects; at the same time the very epitome of tourism kitsch and personal objects for which the owner holds significant affection. Rather than pre-framing these objects either as ‘touristic signifiers’ or as personal memory objects, this article reflects on the roles they take as material and embodied co-habitants in domestic space, living - and communicating – with their owners. Hence, this paper departs from ‘humanistic’ accounts of cohabiting people and things and instead attempts to put human and non-human agents on an equal footing. It does so, by discussing the ‘magical capabilities’ of everyday objects that enable these to enchant the lives of their human cohabitants; animating them with affects and emotions, feelings of remembrance, affection, appreciation and loss. By drawing inspiration from autoethnography and in particular its potentials for interrogating objects, the author explores the ‘souvenirish’ qualities of five homely objects; using this exploration to enter into a dialogue with objects as well as theories and studies of objects. Considering the many faces of the souvenir - as utility item, mediator, fetish, tuner and artwork - the article suggests an opening for more imaginative thinking and explorations of how we live with objects in everyday life.     

Gaze cuing and affective judgments of objects: I like what you look at

When we see another person look somewhere, we automatically attend to the same location in space. Thisjoint attention emerges early in life and has a great impact on social interactions in development and in everyday adult life. The direction of another’s gaze indicates what object is of current interest, which may be the target for a subsequent action. In this study, we found that objects that are looked at by other people are liked more than objects that do not receive the attention of other people (Experiment 1). This suggests that observing averted gaze can have an impact on the affective appraisals of objects in the environment. This liking effect was absent when an arrow was used to cue attention (Experiment 2). This underlines the importance of other people’s interactions with objects for generating our own impressions of such stimuli in the world.     

Just for Fun: The Playful Image of Nanotechnology

In 1959, Richard Feynman suggested that the most compelling reason to pursue nanoscale research might be ‘just for fun.’ This article traces a history of playful images and ludic practices in nanotechnology. Two case studies—nanocars and nanosoccer—exemplify the ways in which scientific research mobilizes speculative futures, less through engineering design or stepwise protocol than through the recreational dynamics of play. Although such molecular toys might appear frivolous, they index the increasingly widespread conditions of play labor, or ‘playbor’, shaping today’s technoculture. Exploring the processes of transmutation and transvaluation by which technological imaginaries are rendered operative, this article tells a story of how the nanoworld became an everyday reality by becoming a game.     

Interventions in everyday lives: How clients use psychotherapy outside their sessions

The purpose of psychotherapy is to help clients address and overcome problems troubling them in their everyday lives. Therapy can therefore only work if clients include it in their ongoing lives to deal with their problems. Detailed, systematic research is needed on how clients do so in their everyday lives outside their sessions. A design of exploratory case studies on this topic is presented in this article. The main outcomes of such a case study on family therapy are then laid out in general terms. They highlight how treatment practices and clients’ ordinary everyday practices interact when clients change their everyday lives to overcome their troubles. They also highlight what it involves for clients to accomplish this. It is concluded that we need more research on how to understand intervention; on the interaction between interventions and clients’ conduct of their everyday life; on sessions as a particular, secluded part of clients’ ongoing everyday lives, and on how to consider therapists’ procedures and conduct of sessions accordingly.     

Being Watched by Anthropomorphized Objects Affects Charitable Donation in Religious People

This study assessed the effect of bottom‐up visual cues—the cues of being watched—from anthropomorphized (face‐like) everyday objects on religious people's prosocial behavior. As religious people are more likely than less‐religious people to perceive faces in everyday objects and as perception of face‐like objects promotes prosociality, it was expected that religious people would become more prosocial when they perceived face‐like objects. To test the hypothesis, the study replicated a past finding in a Japanese sample in which religious people tended to perceive a face in everyday objects. Next, results showed that the decision to donate in religious people (compared to less‐religious people) was increased when a face‐like object was displayed with charitable appeals. This effect was not observed with a non‐face‐like object. The current study indicates that interaction with the surrounding environment plays an important role in motivating prosocial behavior among religious people.     

Conspicuous consumption versus utilitarian ideals: How different levels of power shape consumer behavior

The present work examines how experiencing high versus low power creates qualitatively distinct psychological motives that produce unique consumption patterns. Based on accumulating evidence that states of power increase focus on one’s own internal desires, we propose that high power will lead to a greater preference for products that are viewed as offering utility (e.g., performance, quality) to the individual. In contrast, extending past research showing that powerlessness fosters a compensatory motive to restore power; we demonstrate that the powerless prefer visible or conspicuous consumption that signals status to others. Regardless of whether high and low power were measured, episodically primed, or structurally manipulated, and regardless of how consumption patterns were measured (e.g., purchasing intentions, consumer attitudes, or creation of one’s own advertising slogan), five experiments support a parsimonious model for how different levels of power impact consumer behavior. Given the pervasiveness of everyday fluctuations in power, and the governing role of consumption in everyday life, these findings have potentially broad implications, from tailored advertising to different market segments to understanding the rise in consumer debt.     

Ways in which coherence is confirmation conducive

Recent works in epistemology show that the claim that coherence is truth conducive – in the sense that, given suitable ceteris paribus conditions, more coherent sets of statements are always more probable – is dubious and possibly false. From this, it does not follows that coherence is a useless notion in epistemology and philosophy of science. Dietrich and Moretti (Philosophy of science 72(3): 403–424, 2005) have proposed a formal of account of how coherence is confirmation conducive—that is, of how the coherence of a set of statements facilitates the confirmation of such statements. This account is grounded in two confirmation transmission properties that are satisfied by some of the measures of coherence recently proposed in the literature. These properties explicate everyday and scientific uses of coherence. In his paper, I review the main findings of Dietrich and Moretti (2005) and define two evidence-gathering properties that are satisfied by the same measures of coherence and constitute further ways in which coherence is confirmation conducive. At least one of these properties vindicates important applications of the notion of coherence in everyday life and in science.     

Everyday temptations: an experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control

How often and how strongly do people experience desires, to what extent do their desires conflict with other goals, and how often and successfully do people exercise self-control to resist their desires? To investigate desire and attempts to control desire in everyday life, we conducted a large-scale experience sampling study based on a conceptual framework integrating desire strength, conflict, resistance (use of self-control), and behavior enactment. A sample of 205 adults wore beepers for a week. They furnished 7,827 reports of desire episodes and completed personality measures of behavioral inhibition system/behavior activation system (BIS/BAS) sensitivity, trait self-control, perfectionism, and narcissistic entitlement. Results suggest that desires are frequent, variable in intensity, and largely unproblematic. Those urges that do conflict with other goals tend to elicit resistance, with uneven success. Desire strength, conflict, resistance, and self-regulatory success were moderated in multiple ways by personality variables as well as by situational and interpersonal factors such as alcohol consumption, the mere presence of others, and the presence of others who already had enacted the desire in question. Whereas personality generally had a stronger impact on the dimensions of desire that emerged early in its course (desire strength and conflict), situational factors showed relatively more influence on components later in the process (resistance and behavior enactment). In total, these findings offer a novel and detailed perspective on the nature of everyday desires and associated self-regulatory successes and failures.     

How Tangible Mock-Ups Support Design Collaboration

This paper is a contribution to a more conscious use of tangible mock-ups in collaborative design processes. It describes a design team’s use of mock-ups in a series of workshops involving potential customers and users. Focus is primarily on the use of three-dimensional design mock-ups and how differences in these affected the dialogue. Reflective conversations were established by using tangible mock-ups as “things-to-think with.” They served as boundary objects that spanned the gap between the different competencies and interests of participants in design. The design mock-ups evoked different things for different participants, whereas the challenge for the design team was to find boundaries upon which everybody could agree. The level of details represented in a mock-up affected the communication so that a mock-up with few details evoked different issues, whereas a very detailed mock-up evoked a smaller variation of issues resulting in a more focused communication.     

Deeper Affinities: Fundamental Resonances Between Psychoanalysis and Religion

This essay considers how we “create meaning” in the interplay of “felt sense” and “symbols,” and examines the direct and immediate interplay between some common everyday experiences and a series of concepts from psychoanalytic perspectives to reveal how this interplay has affinities with religion. Psychoanalysis and religion are overlapping projects. Psychoanalytic symbolizing of experience facilitates our knowing features of religion not previously known, as well as knowing features previously known, in new ways.

Preexisting knowledge versus on-line learning: what do young infants really know about spatial location?

Contemporary knowledge of infant cognition relies heavily on violation-of-expectation experiments. However, there are two ways to conceptualize what occurs in such studies. Babies may react to anomalous test events because of preexisting world knowledge. Alternatively, they may react because they have learned about events during the familiarization period. One way to distinguish these possibilities is to contrast familiarization with everyday versus anomalous events. In the studies we report here, we used this method to probe the nature of 5-month-olds' expectations about the locations of objects hidden in sand and later revealed. In Experiment 1, infants who initially saw everyday events did react to anomalous ones, as found previously, whereas infants who initially saw anomalous events did not react to everyday events. In Experiment 2, two alternative explanations of this pattern were ruled out. We conclude that by the age of 5 months, infants have expectations regarding the location of objects in continuous space.     

Can language restructure cognition? The case for space

Frames of reference are coordinate systems used to compute and specify the location of objects with respect to other objects. These have long been thought of as innate concepts, built into our neurocognition. However, recent work shows that the use of such frames in language, cognition and gesture varies cross-culturally, and that children can acquire different systems with comparable ease. We argue that language can play a significant role in structuring, or restructuring, a domain as fundamental as spatial cognition. This suggests we need to rethink the relation between the neurocognitive underpinnings of spatial cognition and the concepts we use in everyday thinking, and, more generally, to work out how to account for cross-cultural cognitive diversity in core cognitive domains.     

On Tichy’s determiners and Zalta’s abstract objects

It is not a common practice to postulate meaning entities treated as objects of some kind. The paper demonstrates two ways of introducing meaning-objects in two logics of natural language, Tichy’s Transparent Intensional Logic and Zalta’s Intensional Logic of Abstract Objects. Tichy’s theory belongs to the Fregean line of thinking, with what he calls ‘constructions’ as Fregean senses, and ‘determiners’ as object-like meaning entities constructed by the senses. Zalta’s theory belongs to Meinongian logics and he postulates a rich realm of abstract Meinongian objects to play the role of meanings. The paper analyses the mechanisms of reference in both conceptions and it offers a comparison of the mediating meaning-objects and the framework designed to expose this mediation in both theories. An attempt is made to expose how the treatment of the meaning entities depends upon the theory of meaning which is assumed.