Erica Fox Brindley,Music, Cosmology,and the Politics of Harmony in Early China.

Chinese music is a broad topic that includes a wide variety of methodological premises, which music historians, ethnomusicologists, music theorists, and systematic musicologists can use for fruitful exploration. In her book Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China （MCPH, hereafter）, Erica Fox Brindley, who is an intellectual and cultural historian of early China, undertakes an historical approach and works out the role of musical sound in the social, natural, and religious order. She explores ＂the role of music, and even sound itself, as both an agent and indicator of moral, orderly, and cosmically balanced rule＂ （42）. Based on early imperial texts Brindley points out that already during the Warring States period （481-221BC） sound （sheng 声） is clearly a component of the cosmos and later, during the Han Dynasty （202BC-220AD）, possesses special cosmic efficacy （69）. The concept of sheng plays an important role in her explanations of the cosmological and political aspects of music,     

The effect of landmark and body-based sensory information on route knowledge

Two experiments investigated the effects of landmarks and body-based information on route knowledge. Participants made four out-and-back journeys along a route, guided only on the first outward trip and with feedback every time an error was made. Experiment 1 used 3-D virtual environments (VEs) with a desktop monitor display, and participants were provided with no supplementary landmarks, only global landmarks, only local landmarks, or both global and local landmarks. Local landmarks significantly reduced the number of errors that participants made, but global landmarks did not. Experiment 2 used a head-mounted display; here, participants who physically walked through the VE (translational and rotational body-based information) made 36% fewer errors than did participants who traveled by physically turning but changing position using a joystick. Overall, the experiments showed that participants were less sure of where to turn than which way, and journey direction interacted with sensory information to affect the number and types of errors participants made.     

The advantage of mentally rotating clockwise

The time taken to decide whether a character is shown in its mirror or normal version has been shown to increase approximately linearly with the angular departure from an up-right position. Additionally, in some studies, decisions took longer for clockwise tilted characters than for counterclockwise tilted ones. Other studies do not report the latter effect. We argue that inconsistencies across studies are caused by variance in participants' strategies. The task employed here was specifically designed to bring these strategies and thereby the direction of rotation under experimental control. From the EEG recorded during the rotation period, we extracted an event-related slow potential whose amplitude is sensitive to the amount of mental rotation. In both strategy conditions, the slow potential's amplitude was lower for clockwise than for counterclockwise rotations. We take this as evidence that mental rotation of alphanumeric characters is easier in a clockwise than in a counterclockwise direction.     

Current directions in visual working memory research: An introduction and emerging insights

Visual working memory (VWM) is a core construct in the cognitive (neuro‐)sciences, assumed to serve as a hub for information exchange and thus supporting a multitude of cognitive functions related to processing visual information. Here, we give an introduction into key terms and paradigms and an overview of ongoing debates in the field, to which the articles collected in this Special Issue on ‘Current Directions in Visual Working Memory Research’ contribute. Our aim is to extract, from this overview, some ‘emerging’ theoretical insights concerning questions such as the optimal way to examine VWM, which types of mental representations contribute to performance on VWM tasks, and how VWM keeps features from the same object together and apart from features of concurrently maintained objects (the binding problem).     

Two good reasons to say ‘change!’ – ensemble representations as well as item representations impact standard measures of VWM capacity

Visual working memory (VWM) is a central bottleneck in human information processing. Its capacity is most often measured in terms of how many individual‐item representations VWM can hold (k). In the standard task employed to estimate k, an array of highly discriminable colour patches is maintained and, after a short retention interval, compared to a test display (change detection). Recent research has shown that with more complex, structured displays, change‐detection performance is, in addition to individual‐item representations, supported by ensemble representations formed as a result of spatial subgroupings. Here, by asking participants to additionally localize the change, we reveal indication for an influence of ensemble representations even in the very simple, unstructured displays of the colour‐patch change‐detection task. Critically, pure‐item models from which standard formulae of k are derived do not consider ensemble representations and, therefore, potentially overestimate k. To gauge this overestimation, we develop an item‐plus‐ensemble model of change detection and change localization. Estimates of k from this new model are about 1 item (~30%) lower than the estimates from traditional pure‐item models, even if derived from the same data sets.     

Simplified Tableaux for STIT Imagination Logic

Journal of Philosophical Logic - We show how to correct the analytic tableaux system from the paper Olkhovikov and Wansing (Journal of Philosophical Logic, 47(2), 259–279, 2018).     

A Rule-Extension of the Non-Associative Lambek Calculus

An extension L ⁺ of the non-associative Lambek calculus Lis defined. In L ⁺ the restriction to formula-conclusion sequents is given up, and additional left introduction rules for the directional implications are introduced. The system L ⁺ is sound and complete with respect to a modification of the ternary frame semantics for L.