Aristotle and Personal Selling

Abstract

The authors discuss the relevance of Aristotle's writings, particularly in the Rhetoric, to modern-day personal selling. Aristotle endorses a sophisticated approach to selling—advocating a customer orientation and segmented markets. He proposes a three-pronged selling process that includes appeals to reason and the emotions of the purchaser while concurrently convincing the purchaser of the seller's integrity. Aristotle argues that the art of selling is subject to systematic formal treatment and demonstrates the possibilities of formal analysis in persuasion. He further assimilates logical argument with practical persuasion in a way that provides a sound basis for selling strategy.     

Brain activity in adults who stutter: similarities across speaking tasks and correlations with stuttering frequency and speaking rate

Many differences in brain activity have been reported between persons who stutter (PWS) and typically fluent controls during oral reading tasks. An earlier meta-analysis of imaging studies identified stutter-related regions, but recent studies report less agreement with those regions. A PET study on adult dextral PWS (n = 18) and matched fluent controls (CONT, n = 12) is reported that used both oral reading and monologue tasks. After correcting for speech rate differences between the groups the task-activation differences were surprisingly small. For both analyses only some regions previously considered stutter-related were more activated in the PWS group than in the CONT group, and these were also activated during eyes-closed rest (ECR). In the PWS group, stuttering frequency was correlated with cortico-striatal-thalamic circuit activity in both speaking tasks. The neuroimaging findings for the PWS group, relative to the CONT group, appear consistent with neuroanatomic abnormalities being increasingly reported among PWS.     

Parents’ Rights and Educational Provision

Legitimate parental interests need to be distinguished from any putative rights parents qua parents may be said to possess. Parents have no right to insulate their children from conceptions of the good at variance with those of their own. Claims to the right to faith schools, private schools, home-schooling or to withdraw a child from any aspect of the curriculum designed to enhance a child’s capacity for autonomous decision-making, are refuted.     

Listeners invest in an assumed other's perspective despite cognitive cost

We explored perspective-taking behavior in a visuospatial mental rotation task that requires listeners to adopt an egocentric or “other-centric” frame of reference. In the current task, objects could be interpreted relative to the point-of-view of the listener (egocentric) or of a simulated partner (other-centric). Across three studies, we evaluated participants’ willingness to consider and act on partner-specific information, showing that a partner’s perceived ability to contribute to collaborative mutual understanding modulated participants’ perspective-taking behavior, either by increasing other-centric (Study 2) or egocentric (Study 3) responding. Moreover, we show that a large proportion of participants resolved referential ambiguity in terms of their partner’s perspective, even when it was more cognitively difficult to do so (as tracked by online movement measures), and when the presence of a social partner had to be assumed (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, participants continued to consider their partner’s perspective during trials where visual perspectives were shared. Our results show that participants will thoroughly invest in either an other-centric or egocentric mode of responding, and that perspective-taking strategies are not always dictated by minimizing processing demands, but by more potent (albeit subtle) factors in the social context.     

Artificial neural networks for analyzing inter-limb coordination: the golf chip shot

Motor control research relies on theories, such as coordination dynamics, adapted from physical sciences to explain the emergence of coordinated movement in biological systems. Historically, many studies of coordination have involved inter-limb coordination of relatively few degrees of freedom. This study looked at the high-dimensional inter-limb coordination used to perform the golf chip shot toward six different target distances. This study also introduces a visualization of high-dimensional coordination relevant within the coordination dynamics theoretical framework. A specific type of Artificial Neural Network (ANN), the Self-Organizing Map (SOM), was used for the analysis. In this study, the trajectory of consecutive best-matching nodes on the output map was used as a collective variable and subsequently fed into a second SOM which was used to create visualization of coordination stability. The SOM trajectories showed changes in coordination between movement patterns used for short chip shots and movement patterns used for long chip shots. The attractor diagrams showed non-linear phase transitions for three out of four players. The methods used in this study may offer a solution for researchers from a coordination dynamics perspective who intend to use data obtained from discrete high-dimensional movements.     

But is it evolution…?

We applaud Müller & Schumann (M&S) for bringing needed attention to the problem of motivation for common non-addictive drug use, as opposed to the usual focus on exotic drugs and addiction. Unfortunately, their target article has many underdeveloped and sometimes contradictory ideas. Here, we will focus on three key issues.     

语言期望概率、不确定性输入及其对阅读的眼动研究启示(中文)

One nearly ubiquitous assumption in models of linguistic comprehension and of eye movement control in reading alike is of partial modularization between word-level and sentence-level processing: that the outcome of word recognition, and thus the input to sentence-level comprehension, is a categorial representation. Yet such a partial modularization throws away residual uncertainty regarding word identity that might potentially be of value to the comprehender further downstream in the sentence. Here I describe a line of research combining computational modeling with experimental eye-tracking work to explore the consequences of removing this partial modularity assumption.     

Han feizi's legalism versus kautilya's Arthashastra

Writing only decades apart, Han Feizi (ca. 250 BCE) and Kautilya (ca. 300 BCE) were two great political thinkers who argued for strong leaders, king or emperor, to unify warring states and bring peace, who tried to show how a ruler controls his ministers as well as the populace, defended the need for spies and violence, and developed the key ideas needed to support the bureaucracies of the emerging and unified states of China and India respectively. Whereas both thinkers disliked the new merchants, Han Feizi seems content with a traditional feudal economy, whereas Kautilya wanted to use the state to increase production and the wealth in the king's treasury. Kautilya also had much more extensive discussions of war and diplomacy.