Regulating Biopharming: The Prism of Farmer Knowledge

Farmers have local knowledge relevant to the prospective assessment of biopharming—the farming of transgenic plants and animals genetically modified to produce pharmaceutical substances for use in humans or animals. However, biopharming regulatory regimes are being constructed in ways that render farmers' knowledge irrelevant. The exclusion of farmer knowledge is traceable to what we call its politico-epistemic unworkability as regulatory knowledge in regulatory regimes characterised not only by a focus on risk but also by pre-commitments to market-driven innovation and individual freedom of choice. Such innovation requires predictability in the regulatory environment, which is supplied in part through regulatory authorities' adoption of risk-assessment methodologies that both assume predictability (of natural and social worlds) and generate predictable decision outcomes. These regulatory approaches are co-constituted with scientific knowledge of gene flow developed through studies that can demonstrate a reliable and readily modellable decline of undesirable effect across space or time and therefore make possible the setting of clear and workable parameters for risk management. The farmers' knowledge discussed here highlights the extent to which this is a process of co-production. Moreover, it suggests that the claimed economic advantages of outdoor biopharming, achieved through the substitution of agronomic practice for laboratory infrastructure, depend both on natural processes that always also threaten to undermine confinement and on the habitus of successful farmers, which may in fact be incompatible with the kind of risk management that biopharming requires.     

Facial expression discrimination varies with presentation time but not with fixation on features: A backward masking study using eye-tracking

The current study investigated the effects of presentation time and fixation to expression-specific diagnostic features on emotion discrimination performance, in a backward masking task. While no differences were found when stimuli were presented for 16.67 ms, differences between facial emotions emerged beyond the happy-superiority effect at presentation times as early as 50 ms. Happy expressions were best discriminated, followed by neutral and disgusted, then surprised, and finally fearful expressions presented for 50 and 100 ms. While performance was not improved by the use of expression-specific diagnostic facial features, performance increased with presentation time for all emotions. Results support the idea of an integration of facial features (holistic processing) varying as a function of emotion and presentation time.     

Direct Evidence of Memory Retrieval as a Source of Difficulty in Non‐Local Dependencies in Language

Linguistic dependencies between non‐adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non‐local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered. According to these memory‐based accounts, making the first dependent accessible at the time when the second dependent is encountered should help alleviate the difficulty associated with the processing of non‐local dependencies. In a dual‐task paradigm, participants read sentences that did or did not contain a non‐local dependency (i.e., object‐ and subject‐extracted cleft constructions) while simultaneously remembering a word. The memory task was aimed at making the word held in memory accessible throughout the sentence. In an object‐extracted cleft (e.g., It was Ellen whom John consulted…), the object (Ellen) must be retrieved from memory when consulted is encountered. In the critical manipulation, the memory word was identical to the verb's object (ELLEN). In these conditions, the extraction effect was reduced in the comprehension accuracy data and eliminated in the reading time data. These results add to the body of evidence supporting memory‐based accounts of syntactic complexity.     

Source misattributions and false recognition errors: Examining the role of perceptual resemblance and imagery generation processes

In three experiments, we examine the extent to which participants’ memory errors are affected by the perceptual features of an encoding series and imagery generation processes. Perceptual features were examined by manipulating the features associated with individual items as well as the relationships among items. An encoding instruction manipulation was included to examine the effects of explicit requests to generate images. In all three experiments, participants falsely claimed to have seen pictures of items presented as words, committing picture misattribution errors. These misattribution errors were exaggerated when the perceptual resemblance between pictures and images was relatively high (Experiment 1) and when explicit requests to generate images were omitted from encoding instructions (Experiments 1 and 2). When perceptual cues made the thematic relationships among items salient, the level and pattern of misattribution errors were also affected (Experiments 2 and 3). Results address alternative views about the nature of internal representations resulting in misattribution errors and refute the idea that these errors reflect only participants’ general impressions or beliefs about what was seen.     

Investigating local and global effects of surface colours and contours in amodal completion

ABSTRACT

We studied interpretations of partly occluded shapes. Models that account for amodal completion mostly deal with local and global contour characteristics. In the current study, we were interested in the effects of colour on local and global contour completions. In our stimuli, local contour completions comprised simple linear extensions of the partly occluded contours, whereas global contour completions accounted for global shape regularities. Our stimuli were designed such that the visible surface colour could also be completed in a local or global fashion, being consistent or inconsistent with contour completions. We tested the preferred interpretations of the partly occluded shapes by using a sequential matching task. Participants had to judge whether a test shape could be a previously shown partly occluded shape. We found that interpretations of partly occluded shapes depend on both colour and contour characteristics. Additional time bin analyses revealed that for fast responses colour and contour completions already depend on the visible context of the partly occluded shapes, while for slow responses the congruency between colour and contour completions play a role as well.     

Reflections on relational readings of organizational learning

In this concluding article we further reflect on relational readings of organizational learning and how they can contribute to organization studies and organizing practices. As has been seen, the root metaphor of “organizational learning” takes a variety of forms. These include “product-oriented” pictures such as learning curves, strategy, and business processes, and the generative metaphor of organizational learning as conversations-for-new-possibilities. This special issue highlights the contribution of learning-as-conversations, especially in those organizational instances where the organizing is “in-the-making” and where the creation of a transitional space can be a new meeting ground for participants. In an increasingly globalized world we are more and more in need of the ability to construct such transitional and possibility-enabling practices. It can be a task of work and organizational psychology to contribute ideas and practices for this endeavour.     

广告语言与产品卷入度对广告卷入度的影响研究

从产品角度对地方语广告进行研究。本研究将语言熟练度和地域文化认同这两个因素作为控制变量,选取产品卷入度作为调节变量,分别在语音和文本广告两种不同的广告媒介中,研究广告语言（普通话VS粤语）对广告卷入度（认知卷入度VS情感卷入度）的影响机制。结果表明：对于高卷入度产品广告,普通话比粤语产生的广告认知卷入度和情感卷入度都更高;对于低卷入度产品广告,无论广告使用普通话抑或粤语,消费者对广告的认知卷入度都没有显著差异,但粤语比普通话能带来更高的广告情感卷入度。     

Discrimination of familiar human faces in dogs (Canis familiaris)

Faces are an important visual category for many taxa, and the human face is no exception to this. Because faces differ in subtle ways and possess many idiosyncratic features, they provide a rich source of perceptual cues. A fair amount of those cues are learned through social interactions and are used for future identification of individual humans. These effects of individual experience can be studied particularly well in hetero-specific face perception. Domestic dogs represent a perfect model in this respect, due to their proved ability to extract important information from the human face in socio-communicative interactions. There is also suggestive evidence that dogs can identify their owner or other familiar human individuals by using visual information from the face. However, most studies have used only dogs’ looking behavior to examine their visual processing of human faces and it has been demonstrated only that dogs can differentiate between familiar and unknown human faces. Here, we examined the dog's ability to discriminate the faces of two familiar persons by active choice (approach and touch). Furthermore, in successive stages of the experiment we investigated how well dogs discriminate humans in different representations by systematically reducing the informational richness and the quality of the stimuli. We found a huge inter-individual and inter-stage variance in performance, indicating differences across dogs in their learning ability as well as their selection of discriminative cues. On a group level, the performance of dogs significantly decreased when they were presented with pictures of human heads after having learned to discriminate the real heads, and when – after relearning – confronted with the same pictures showing only the inner parts of the heads. However, as two dogs quickly mastered all stages, we conclude that dogs are in principle able to discriminate people on the basis of visual information from their faces and by making active choices.     

Investigation of the process underpinning vowel‐size correspondence

Vowel‐size correspondence is frequently reported in the literature: Namely, the vowels a and i tend to elicit bigger and smaller images, respectively. Previous studies have speculated that two factors may contribute to this vowel‐size correspondence: the acoustical features of vowels and the speaker's kinesthetic experience of producing them. However, these two factors have been investigated without being considered separately in previous research. In this study, we investigated the process underpinning vowel‐size correspondence by using speeded classification tasks and manipulating the two factors mentioned above separately in two experiments. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that a and i elicited bigger and smaller images even in the absence of kinesthetic experience. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that the proprioception of the size of the oral cavity on its own may not contribute to vowel‐size correspondence. Thus, the acoustic features of vowels mainly contribute to vowel‐size correspondence, although other possibilities are also discussed.     

What makes a saint? A Lincoln case study in the communion of the local and the universal Church

Within the curtilage of Lincoln Cathedral lie buried the remains of three very different people to whom sainthood has been attributed: Saint Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln (d.1200); 'Little Saint Hugh' (d.1255), a child maliciously alleged to have been murdered by the local Jewish community; and Edward King (d.1910), Anglican Bishop of Lincoln. Hugh is a saint of the Catholic Church, commemorated by Catholics and Anglicans; 'Little Saint Hugh' was for a short while acclaimed by local people as a saint but never officially recognised as one; Edward King is commemorated by Anglicans but not formally recognised as a saint. The marked difference of approach to the attribution of sainthood between local Christians and Catholic Church authorities, as well as between Catholics and Anglicans, is illustrated by this case study, which raises important ecumenical questions: 'What makes a saint?’, ‘How are non-Catholics to regard the Roman Catholic procedure for beatification and canonisation?’, ‘To what extent can there be fully ecumenical calendars of local saints?’, ‘Does beatification offer a way forward by which Catholics may recognise the holiness of non-Catholic Christians?’