Individual reactions to a multisensory immersive virtual environment: the impact of a wind farm on individuals

The aim of this study was to assess the impact of a wind farm on individuals by means of an audio-visual methodology that tried to simulate biologically plausible individual-environment interactions. To disentangle the effects of auditory and visual components on cognitive performances and subjective evaluations, unimodal (Audio or Video) and bimodal (Audio + Video) approaches were compared. Participants were assigned to three experimental conditions that reproduced a wind farm by means of an immersive virtual reality system: bimodal condition, reproducing scenarios with both acoustic and visual stimuli; unimodal visual condition, with only visual stimuli; unimodal auditory condition, with only auditory stimuli. While immersed in the virtual scenarios, participants performed tasks assessing verbal fluency, short-term verbal memory, backward counting, and distance estimations (egocentric: how far is the turbine from you?; allocentric: how far is the turbine from the target?). Afterwards, participants reported their degree of visual and noise annoyance. The results revealed that the presence of a visual scenario as compared to the only availability of auditory stimuli may exert a negative effect on resource-demanding cognitive tasks but a positive effect on perceived noise annoyance. This supports the idea that humans perceive the environment holistically and that auditory and visual features are processed in close interaction.     

Differences in the perception and time course of syntactic and semantic violations

A reading time and an ERP experiment conducted in Italian investigated the parser's responses to a syntactic violation (subject-verb number agreement) and to a semantic violation (subject-verb selectional restriction), examining the time course of comprehension processes until sentence end. The reading-time data showed that the syntactic violation was detected earlier than the semantic one and that the two violations differed in the time-course. The ERP data fully supported the reading time data: Syntactic anomalies elicited a left anterior negativity (LAN) and a P600. Semantic anomalies elicited a N400 centred on the parietal sites which started 90 ms later (latency 430 ms) than the LAN. Furthermore, the N400 evoked by the words that followed the target word continued and increased until sentence end. The results are discussed with respect to the hypotheses that the parser constructs distinct syntactic and semantic analyses of a sentence and that this characteristic holds cross-linguistically. The appropriateness of different methodologies to the study of sentence processing is also evaluated.     

Natural law and history in Locke's theory of distributive justice

According to the tradition of natural law justice is inherent to, and should always be observed in, all interpersonal relations: the science of natural law is nothing more or less than the expression of such principles of justice. The theoretical peculiarities that crop up regarding the lawfulness of appropriation are determined by the indirect interpersonal relations that take place within the process of appropriation: though appropriation is an action directed not towards another person or his property, but towards tangible external goods, this action may have important consequences for other people. Therefore Locke's theory of appropriation is a theory of justice.Locke's solution is made possible by the methodological improvement which allows a clear separation between the natural law and the historical and empirical conditions of its application: this improvement is a consequence of the distinction between modes and substances established in Locke's Essay.Locke's theory can be considered an extensive re-elaboration, in polemic against Filmer, of the anti-monopolistic principle characteristic of the whole of Scholastic social thought: this principle is intimately connected with the principle of man's natural liberty.Locke maintains a negative and formal conception of justice: justice prohibits interference with others' liberty of appropriation. Alongside the justice is the positive and conditional obligation of charity which prescribes the transfer of some of one's own goods to others who need them in order to survive. But for Locke there are precise limits on the obligation of charity: the application of charity suspends the application of justice only when the immediate physical survival is at stake; in all other cases justice leaves no room for charity.The Lockian negative conception of justice, which allows unlimited liberty of appropriation, is dependent on the empirical and historical condition of the incommensurability of the main resource. The widespread use of money acts as an accelerating element in the process of exhaustion of the incommensurability of land-resources but, at the same time, it renders self-preservation and appropriation almost completely independent of the natural environment. Money creates an infinite number of opportunities for the outlay of labour irrespective of the availability of land, that is, it renders labour the principal resource of the civilized world, and labour is an incommensurable and infinitely reproducible resource. The incommensurability of the labour resource thus supports the Lockian theory of negative distributive justice; but over the Lockian solution already loomed the threatening shadow of pauperism.The subject of this essay is further dealt with in my book on Locke's political and social philosophy Nel crepuscolo della probabilitá, Bibliopolis, Napoli, 1983. There I develop further the interpretation of Locke's theory of justice presented here and analyse his theoretical and historical presuppositions.     

The handedness of imagined bodies in action and the role of perspective taking

Past research at the nexus of motor control and perception investigated the role of perspective taking in many behavioral and neuroimaging studies. Some investigators addressed the issue of one's own vs. others' action imagination, but the possible effects of a front or a back view in imagining others' actions have so far been neglected. We report two 'single trial' experiments in which a total of 640 participants were asked to imagine a person performing a manual action - either in a front or in a back view - and then to indicate the hand used by the imagined person during movement execution. In such a task, we assume the existence of two distinct biases: a perceptual-mnemonic bias due to subjects' visual experience of others' actions, encouraging them to imagine right-handed movements, and a motor bias due to subjects' experience of self-made actions, encouraging them to imagine movements performed with the same hand as their dominant hand. We hypothesized that a greater involvement of motor representations in the back view compared to the front view could result in an increased correspondence between one's own manual preference and the hand used by the imagined agent in the former condition. The results of both experiments were consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that while imagining others' actions we employ motor simulations in different degrees according to the perspective adopted.     

The sound-hand

Through clinical vignettes taken from the analytic treatment of an autistic child, the paper explores Bion' s notion of selected fact in relation to the post-Jungian theoretical speculation on the emergent mind. The issue of the subjectivity of the analyst is considered and explored in this light. A review of some neuroscience research contributions to a possible understanding of dialogue, empathy and rhythm is briefly described, particularly in terms of its potential usefulness for the psychoanalytic mind when working with autistic children. In general, the notions of ‘temporal shapes’ (Alvarez) and ‘sound-object’ (Maiello) provide support for the theoretical and clinical explorations of the issue of rhythmic interactions. Rhythmic sounds are distinguished from stereotypical and meaningless sounds produced by the analysand, whether or not they are accompanied by body movements, and their function of activating representations and amplifications in the analyst's mind is explored in the stage of treatment when the child does not yet speak. The Jungian concept of amplification is considered and revisited in this context.     

Castañeda’s Moral Theory and Globalization

This paper examines the moral theory presented by Castañeda in his 1974 book The Stucture of Morality and illustrates its usefulness in dealing with some intercultural phenomena concerning women and children rights which globalization has brought to the fore. In particular, Castañeda’s crucial distinction between moral codes and the moral ideal is highlighted. Moreover, the role that freedom and happiness play in his framework is discussed and further elaborated by appealing to Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive freedom and current empirical studies on happiness.     

Analysis and decomposition in Peirce

Synthese - Peirce seems to maintain two incompatible theses: that a sentence is multiply analyzable into subject and predicate, and that a sentence is uniquely analyzable as a combination of...     

Guilt and focusing in decision-making

In this paper we examined the impact of a specific emotion, guilt, on focusing in decision-making. Through the focusing mechanism, when making decisions, individuals tend to restrict their thoughts to what is explicitly represented in the decisional task, disregarding alternatives. In this paper, three experiments are performed to investigate whether an emotional state of guilt can critically guide individuals' focusing, and even prevailing over the focusing mechanism. Guilty emotional state was induced by asking participants to write about a guilty related life event. The emotional state was thus neither generated by nor related to the tasks used in the experiments. Results of the first two studies show that guilt affects focusing in decision-making in the case of only one explicitly specified option (a positive or a negative one). Guilty participants, when presented with a stated option that has predominantly positive characteristics, prefer other, unspecified options over the positive one. Guilty participants faced with a stated option that has predominantly negative features tend to prefer it to other, unspecified, options, instead. Finally, experiment 3 shows that guilty participants presented with two different options (a negative vs. a positive one) having different degrees of explicitness (i.e. they are not equally represented in the decision frame), focus on the negative option, even though the latter was not explicitly represented but only hinted at the end of the text. Overall, these results suggest that guilt emotion state can play a crucial role in either strengthening or reducing the focusing mechanism. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.