Boskovic's unobservables

Boskovic treated unobservables in two different ways. During his earlier period (1741–48) the difference between observables and unobservables was a significant element of his specific semantic instrumentalism. The sentences of unobservables (such as absolute space, time and motions) were treated only as convenient tools conceived to provide for the empirical success of a theory. Later, especially in his Theory of Natural Philosophy (1763), Boskovic relativized this distinction by positing absolute properties (continuity and impenetrability), which are common to both observables and unobservables. As a scientific realist he was committed to his original unobservable entities, i.e. “points of matter”. Due to the intrinsic paradox contained in the concept of these points, his realist position was led to the absurd, which demands an anti‐realist interpretation of Boskovic's theory.     

Parsing as a Cue-Based Retrieval Model

This paper develops a novel psycholinguistic parser and tests it against experimental and corpus reading data. The parser builds on the recent research into memory structures, which argues that memory retrieval is content-addressable and cue-based. It is shown that the theory of cue-based memory systems can be combined with transition-based parsing to produce a parser that, when combined with the cognitive architecture ACT-R, can model reading and predict online behavioral measures (reading times and regressions). The parser's modeling capacities are tested against self-paced reading experimental data (Grodner & Gibson, 2005), eye-tracking experimental data (Staub, 2011), and a self-paced reading corpus (Futrell et al., 2018).     

Phenomenological approaches to personal identity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on...     

Trust in alternative and professional media: The case of the youth news audiences in three European countries

Abstract

This exploratory paper applying cross-cultural and developmental perspective analyses and discusses trust in alternative media and its relation to trust in professional media, seeking to identify the national specifics of media trust and its developmental patterns. Employing 2016 survey data of Czech, Estonian and Greek youth (aged 14–25, N = 3654) collected as part of the international CATCH-EyoU project (Horizon 2020), the study outlines the typology of media trust, comprising trust in alternative and professional media, and compares social and political predictors influencing media trust in the three countries. The study illustrates the diversity of relations between the two types of media trust, concluding that differences in selected predictors of media trust and the distribution of media trust types across national sub-samples illuminate the strong role national context plays, illustrating the varying pathways development of media trust follows in these varied contexts along socioeconomic and cultural lines.     

Battle Christologies as a risky act of resistance à la Jesus: A South African perspective

This study depicts African “battle Christologies” as a risky act of resistance à la Jesus, that is, concomitant of Jesus’ own life in terms of their modus operandi. Their christic features are discussed in contradistinction to the mainstream Western christological tradition. Only by probing the dynamics of power and difference inherent in the cultural appropriations of Jesus can their specific performative consequences be accurately captured. In light of the study, some methodological considerations are being offered with regard to the way in which prophetic theology should be done in post‐apartheid South Africa and the Global South in general.     

The perception of visual emotion: Comparing different measures of awareness

Here, we explore the sensitivity of different awareness scales in revealing conscious reports on visual emotion perception. Participants were exposed to a backward masking task involving fearful faces and asked to rate their conscious awareness in perceiving emotion in facial expression using three different subjective measures: confidence ratings (CRs), with the conventional taxonomy of certainty, the perceptual awareness scale (PAS), through which participants categorize “raw” visual experience, and post-decision wagering (PDW), which involves economic categorization. Our results show that the CR measure was the most exhaustive and the most graded. In contrast, the PAS and PDW measures suggested instead that consciousness of emotional stimuli is dichotomous. Possible explanations of the inconsistency were discussed. Finally, our results also indicate that PDW biases awareness ratings by enhancing first-order accuracy of emotion perception. This effect was possibly a result of higher motivation induced by monetary incentives.     

A Note on Bisimulation and Modal Equivalence in Provability Logic and Interpretability Logic

Provability logic is a modal logic for studying properties of provability predicates, and Interpretability logic for studying interpretability between logical theories. Their natural models are GL-models and Veltman models, for which the accessibility relation is well-founded. That’s why the usual counterexample showing the necessity of finite image property in Hennessy-Milner theorem (see [1]) doesn’t exist for them. However, we show that the analogous condition must still hold, by constructing two GL-models with worlds in them that are modally equivalent but not bisimilar, and showing how these GL-models can be converted to Veltman models with the same properties. In the process we develop some useful constructions: games on Veltman models, chains, and general method of transformation from GL-models/frames to Veltman ones.     

MOST intelligent people are accurate and SOME fast people are intelligent.: Intelligence,working memory,and semantic processing of quantifiers from a computational perspective

The paper explores the relationship between intelligence and the semantic processing of natural language quantifiers. The first study revealed that intelligence is positively associated with the subjects' performance when solving a picture verification task with one of the four types of sentences: Aristotelian (e.g. ‘All cars are red’), parity (e.g. ‘An even number of cars are red’), numerical (e.g. ‘More than five cars are red’), and proportional (‘More than half of the cars are red’). The strongest relationship was observed between the cognitive ability and the accuracy of proportional sentences, in accordance with the computational theory which predicts the highest engagement of working memory (WM) within the group of proportional quantifiers. Moreover, individuals with higher intelligence reacted faster, but this was observed only in case of quantifiers with low complexity. Exploring further, in the second study we found that WM and intelligence were both significant predictors of subjects' score on proportional sentences. In the third study, we examined the relationships between quantifiers, intelligence, short-term memory (STM), and executive control function. STM was correlated with all types of quantifiers that need counting and keeping track of elements (parity, numerical, and proportional). Only proportional quantifiers were associated with cognitive control. The obtained results are discussed within the computational paradigm of language processing.     

Blood flow velocity changes in anterior cerebral arteries during cognitive tasks performance

Objective

Transcranial Doppler sonography (TCD) enables monitoring of blood flow velocities (BFVs) in basal cerebral arteries during different cognitive tasks performance with great temporal resolution. So far, BFVs changes during mental activity were monitored primarily in middle cerebral arteries (MCAs) and little is known about these changes in anterior cerebral arteries (ACAs).

Aim

To determine the effect of different cognitive tasks performance on BFV changes and hemispheric dominance in ACAs and to assess the most suitable activation test for monitoring of BFV changes in ACAs.

Methods

Fourteen right-handed, healthy subjects aged 20–26 were included in the study. BFVs in both ACAs were recorded simultaneously during performance of cognitive tasks designed to activate frontal lobes: phonemic verbal fluency test (pVFT), Stroop tests and Trail Making Tests (TMTs).

Results

A statistically significant BFV increase was recorded in both ACAs during performance of all cognitive tasks. Statistically significant right ACA dominance was found during performance of pVFT and TMTB. The most significant BFV increase was obtained during performance of TMTB.

Conclusion

Our result addressed cognitive tests with great activation potential for monitoring of ACAs that might be used in distinguishing of healthy individuals and patients with neurovascular or neurodegenerative diseases.