Where does it come from? Collaborative emergence in creative work practices

This article presents a case in which analytical tools coming from the tradition of distributed cognition are able to account for what has been defined collaborative emergence (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009; Sawyer 2012) in creative practices. With this article, we aim to contribute to the debate of distributed creativity by discussing an empirical case of collaborative emergence and providing the analytical tools able to account for its analysis. Introducing the concept of a creative network of interactions, we stress the importance of selecting, describing, and analysing the interactions that give rise to the collaborative emergence in creative work. Introducing the concept of collective creative imagination, we account for the collective emergence of the scene. We suggest that collaborative emergence is the result of a process of collective coordination and improvisation, emerging from moment-to-moment contingency in collective cognition and imagination. The new unpredictable outcome does not emerge from a sudden singular intuition avulsed from the environment, but it is the result of several coordinated steps made by the participants.     

Aging in cognitive control of social processing: evidence from the attention network test

ABSTRACT

Aging seems to be associated with impairment of attentional network functioning. It is not known whether social information can modulate this age-related decline. We used three variants of Attention Network test to examine the age-related decline of attentional effects in response to stimuli with and without social-cognitive content. Three groups of younger, middle-aged, and older participants performed the ANT, using fish, drawings, or photographs of faces looking to the left or right as target and flanker stimuli. The results showed that both executive attention and alerting were more resistant to the age-related decline with social stimuli and that orienting attention scores showed a progressive increase with age in the presence of this kind of stimuli. These findings underline the importance of social information in modulating and contrasting the age-related decline and support the status of human faces as a special class of visual stimuli for the human attentional systems.     

Selfhood triumvirate: From phenomenology to brain activity and back again

Recently, a three-dimensional construct model for complex experiential Selfhood has been proposed (Fingelkurts, Fingelkurts, & Kallio-Tamminen, 2016b,c). According to this model, three specific subnets (or modules) of the brain self-referential network (SRN) are responsible for the manifestation of three aspects/features of the subjective sense of Selfhood. Follow up multiple studies established a tight relation between alterations in the functional integrity of the triad of SRN modules and related to them three aspects/features of the sense of self; however, the causality of this relation is yet to be shown. In this article we approached the question of causality by exploring functional integrity within the three SRN modules that are thought to underlie the three phenomenal components of Selfhood while these components were manipulated mentally by experienced meditators in a controlled and independent manner. Participants were requested, in a block-randomised manner, to mentally induce states representing either increased (up-regulation) or decreased (down-regulation) sense of (a) witnessing agency (“Self”), or (b) body representational-emotional agency (“Me”), or (c) reflective/narrative agency (“I”), while their brain activity was recorded by an electroencephalogram (EEG). This EEG-data was complemented by first-person phenomenological reports and standardised questionnaires which focused on subjective contents of three aspects of Selfhood. The results of the study strengthen the case for a direct causative relationship between three phenomenological aspects of Selfhood and related to them three modules of the brain SRN. Furthermore, the putative integrative model of the dynamic interrelations among three modules of the SRN has been proposed.     

Having less,giving less: The effects of unfavorable social comparisons of affluence on people’s willingness to act for the benefit of others

Previous research has found a negative relationship between individual differences in personal relative deprivation (PRD; i.e., resentment stemming from the belief that one is worse off than similar others) and prosociality. Whether PRD causes reductions in people's willingness to act for the benefit of others, however, is yet to be established. Across six studies, we experimentally examined whether experiences of PRD via unfavorable (vs. favorable or lateral) social comparisons of affluence reduced prosociality toward known others and strangers. We found that making hypothetical (Study 1) or real (Study 2) unfavorable social comparisons of affluence in workplace contexts reduced participants’ organizational citizenship behavioral intentions. Furthermore, adverse social comparisons of affluence reduced generosity toward the targets of those comparisons during a Dictator Game (Studies 3 to 6). Across studies, we also measured participants’ subjective and objective socioeconomic status and found, contrary to previous theory and research, no consistent relationship between status and prosociality and no modulation of this relationship by either local or macro-level inequality. These results suggest that local, specific interpersonal comparisons of affluence play a more dominant role in people's willingness to act for the benefit of a comparison target than do their subjective or objective class rank or the prevailing income inequality of the state in which they reside.     

A small look at the ear recognition process using a hybrid approach

The purpose of this document is to offer a combined approach in biometric analysis field, integrating some of the most known techniques using ears to recognize people. This study uses Hausdorff distance as a pre-processing stage adding sturdiness to increase the performance filtering for the subjects to use it in the testing process. Also includes the Image Ray Transform (IRT) and the Haar based classifier for the detection step. Then, the system computes Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) as an input of two neural networks to recognize a person by the patterns of its ear. To show the applied theory experimental results, the above algorithms have been implemented using Microsoft C#. The investigation results showed robustness improving the ear recognition process.     

Weak Ties for a Weak Population: Expanding Personal Social Networks Among the Unemployed to Increase Job‐Seeking Success

Unqualified middle‐aged and older unemployed people have little chance of finding a suitable job via Internet‐based systems. These individuals have a low education level, fewer technological skills, and low self‐esteem as a result of long‐term unemployment; therefore, their relevant job opportunities diminish. This article describes a successful pilot project among 108 chronically unemployed Jews and Arabs in 5 employment centers in Israel. By sharing each other's lists of acquaintances under the guidance of professional consultants, 41% of them found a job. The results have strengthened the authors' assumption that educating people to use expanded weak personal networks (non‐Internet) to find jobs is both effective and beneficial.