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...     

Pigeons use item-specific and category-level information in the identification and categorization of human faces

Three experiments examined the pigeon's ability to adapt to the specific tasks of identification and categorization of complex visual stimuli by attending to information at different levels of abstraction. In Experiment 1, pigeons were successively trained to discriminate first between pairs of human faces from the same sex and then between male and female faces. A final test revealed that the associations formed in the first training phase did not survive categorization training, indicating that the pigeons used item-specific information to discriminate faces of the same sex, but shifted their attention to category-level information for discriminating between the male and female categories. Two further experiments disproved alternative explanations. The results support the feature-learning account of open-ended categorization in animals.     

Natural categorization through multiple feature learning in pigeons

Recently (Troje, Huber, Loidolt, Aust, & Fieder 1999), we found that pigeons discriminated between large sets of photorealistic frontal images of human faces on the basis of sex. This ability was predominantly based on information contained in the visual texture of those images rather than in their configural properties. The pigeons could learn the distinction even when differences of shape and average intensity were completely removed. Here, we proved more specifically the pigeons' flexibility and efficiency to utilize the class-distinguishing information contained in complex natural classes. First, we used principal component as well as discriminant function analysis in order to determine which aspects of the male and female images could support successful categorization. We then conducted various tests involving systematic transformations and reduction of the feature content to examine whether or not the pigeons' categorization behaviour comes under the control of categorylevel feature dimensions-that is, those stimulus aspects that most accurately divide the stimulus classes into the experimenter-defined categories of 'Male' and 'Female'. Enhanced classification ability in the presence of impoverished test faces that varied only along one of the first three principal components provided evidence that the pigeons used these class-distinguishing stimulus aspects as a basis for generalization to new instances.     

Critical phenomenology and psychiatry

Continental Philosophy Review - Whereas classical Critical Theory has tended to view phenomenology as inherently uncritical, the recent upsurge of what has become known as critical phenomenology...     

Order,experience, and critique: The phenomenological method in political and legal theory

Continental Philosophy Review - The paper investigates phenomenology’s possibilities to describe, reflect and critically analyse political and legal orders. It presents a...