Cognitive Realities Research Articles

Evolution of Digitization toward the Internet of Digital & Cognitive Realities and Smart Ecosystems

The evolutionary phases and perspectives of the digitization process are presented focusing on the milestones of technological evolution. The digital convergence of communications, information technology and media, the concept of cognitive infocommunications, the extension of networking by Internet of Things, the immersive technologies as augmented reality and virtual reality and the artificial intelligence have relevant role in the shaping the concept of the Internet of Digital & Cognitive Realities (IoDC) and the Smart Ecosystems as Smart Cities and Smart Factories.

Real subsumption, cultural insurgence and social re-composition

This article looks at the crisis of the classical workers movement from the mid-1970s, and workers’ contribution to the emergence of new radical political and cultural theory from the 1980s in the ongoing struggle of workers against value relations. I deal with four intersecting areas: the neo-liberal attack on the cost of labour power in the Global North; the social, cultural and technical re-composition of the working class globally; the expansion of the participation of a diverse working class in higher education; and the changing function of real subsumption as workers and non-workers are incorporated into value relations through an ideology of economic self-reliance and the new entrepreneurial ethos. From this re-composition emerges the fundamental moving contradiction of our times: the increase in expectation of autonomy with the development of new technical skills across the working class and access to higher education, and the social and cognitive realities of the new economy and new digital culture: a precarious world of automative ‘non-work’, underemployment, passive consumption and deskilling. This conflict between the expectation of autonomy and realities of value production, has, I argue, been one of the driving forces of workers’ contribution to the new radical culture and theory since the 1980s.

Child and Children in a Corpus of American Fiction: Contrasting Semantic Preferences and Their Experiential Motivations

Abstract This study investigates the nature of the semantic differences between collexemes of singular child and plural children in a corpus of American fiction. Collexemes in three specific syntactic slots are investigated: adjectives in the attributive position, nouns grammatically possessed by child’s and children’s, and present participial forms of verbs in the position immediately to the right of child/children. The approach relies on Distinctive Collexeme Analysis to establish statistically significant differences, revealing a surprising variety of semantic distinctions not usually acknowledged in discussions of the singularity vs. plurality of count nouns. Finally, an attempt is made to relate the key findings to broader cognitive and behavioural realities.

Seeking Pedagogical Equilibrium while Teaching Synchronous Online Classes: A Collaborative Self-study

ABSTRACTThis collaborative self-study examines two-teacher educators’ journey when they transferred their face-to-face curriculum into their synchronized online literacy classes using the same web-based tool, yet at different universities while teaching different classes. They explored the dual cognitive processes of subconscious engagement with self-conscious observation by noting how they fully engaged—forgetting the virtual space and technology, while seeking pedagogical equilibrium as they managed problematic situations with which they were confronted. In this, they noted the places they consciously watched, which led to them to experience pedagogical discontentment. Data sources included: (a) class session transcripts, (b) class observations (c) artifacts, and (d) researcher journals. Framed by the perspectives of cognitive constructivism, engagement, and multiple realities, the authors employed multiple qualitative analysis tools to analyze the data, identifying three findings of nuanced tensions in: (a) feedback, (b) relationships, and (c) attitude. In unpacking the nuances, the authors assert course content and technology did not bring about engagement. Rather, it was the pedagogy they applied, which made synchronous pedagogy comparable to the pedagogy of their face-to-face classrooms. As synchronous online education flourishes internationally, these findings showed it is important to accept the nuanced tensions to reach pedagogical equilibrium.

An exploratory study of changes to university EFL teachers’ teaching practices

ABSTRACTThe brief report describes an exploratory investigation into changes to three university EFL teachers’ teaching practices in a research-intensive university framed by managerialist technologies to improve its visibility and global ranking. The findings revealed that substantial changes have been brought about to their teaching practices in terms of falling into the routine of ‘technification of teaching’, producing a spectacle ‘what is there simply to be seen and judged’ or striving to seek out new spaces for ‘authentic’ English teaching. The study concluded with implications for facilitating the managerial reforms that are congruent with the cognitive and contextual realities of different generations of Chinese university EFL teachers.

Graffiti and perceived neighborhood safety: a neuroimaging study

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to uncover the neural basis underlying the negative impact of graffiti on evaluations of neighborhood safety. Design/methodology/approach While in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, participants rated the perceived safety of neighborhood scenes shown in photographic images. Some scenes were systematically altered to include graffiti, surveillance cameras or framed public art. Findings Consistent with previous research, the average safety rating for each scene including graffiti was significantly lower than for every other non-graffiti scene presented. The powerful salience of graffiti (as demonstrated by increased activation of the left fusiform gyrus) accompanied a decreased salience of other built environment scene elements (as demonstrated by reduced activation in the right parahippocampal gyrus). It appears as though the presence of graffiti causes the cognitive impact of other scene elements to fade. This redirection of cognitive focus may help to explain the dominant impact of graffiti on neighborhood safety evaluations. Practical implications Because of these basic perceptual tendencies, graffiti will necessarily dominate neighborhood safety evaluations. In any attempts to improve neighborhood safety evaluations, combating graffiti should be accorded a position of great importance, in keeping with these cognitive realities. Originality/value This is the first neuroimaging study of graffiti and perceived neighborhood safety.

Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Jacono, eds., Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience

This collection includes essays on spatial perception, mirror neurons, the enaction paradigm, and theatrical techniques that aid people with mental and/or physical disabilities. It lacks clear overarching goals and often falls into unexamined assumptions about theatre and speculations about cognitive realities. Nonetheless, several essays advance empirical research on theatre.

Cognitive realism and memory in Proust’s madeleine episode

The famous ‘madeleine episode’ of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is investigated with reference to cognitive realism in the evocation of memory, by asking how this literary memory experience compares with the conceptualization of memory in current cognitive science. Furthermore, what does close reading of the episode informed by current scientific findings and debates on memory and agency tell us about Proust’s categorization of this memory event as involuntary memory, and his presentation of voluntary and involuntary memory as a distinct opposition? I show that the madeleine episode (1) corresponds partly to cognitive realities as documented by recent science and partly to prevalent expectations about cognition or its narration, and (2) undermines the neat voluntary/involuntary distinction it initially seems to illustrate. I suggest how these qualities may affect readers’ responses to Proust’s famously evocative object.

The Politics of Watching

What does it mean to consume and produce images non-stop in the new media economy? Images can be captured, uploaded, downloaded, and disseminated with ease in digital platforms, raising the need to understand how these acts of image capture and circulation are embedded into the familiar and everyday as well as the extraordinary where images can re-negotiate cognitive realities and re-frame notions of authenticity and truth. This new media visuality is characterised by new consumption rituals and practices which transgress the boundaries between private pleasures, personal memories, and voyeurism, on the one hand, and public communion, witnessing, and expose on the other. This paper examines the notion of visuality in digital platforms and its consequences for postmodernity in terms of subjectivity, new forms of engagement and disenfranchisement.

The Cognitive Realism of Memory in Flaubert's <em>Madame Bovary</em>

The ‘cognitive realism' of memory in Madame Bovary is investigated by means of relevant research in the cognitive sciences, drawing conclusions which complement those of traditional literary criticism. In particular, Emma Bovary's memory is elucidated with reference to cognitive-dissonance theory: the human need for coherence between memory and self-image renders the trajectory of her married life psychologically explicable. The findings help account for critics' ambivalent or contradictory responses to Emma's story, and yield hypotheses concerning readers' responses more generally. They also suggest conclusions regarding the disjuncture between literary Realism (which corresponds to our assumptions about cognition) and cognitive realism (which corresponds to the underlying cognitive realities).

Cognitive radio realities

A cognitive radio (CR) is a transceiver that is aware, adaptive, and capable of learning. It may be visualized and realized as an intelligent software package (cognitive engine) controlling a softw...

Narrative and the Fundamental Limitations of Quantification in Crosscultural Research

at least the last 3 decades, international and crosscultural studies of health, religious beliefs, political attitudes, and much else of a fundamentally subjective nature have proliferated. Interest in comparative research emerges from the desire to understand how different cultural, economic, political, and social systems influence individuals' world views, beliefs, and behaviors. Yet the use of subjective information and self-reports has always presented researchers with serious problems that have to do with assessing the comparability of subjective information gathered from respondents from different cultural and linguistic communities (see the Spring 2001 issue of the Journal of Mental Health and Aging1 for several articles dealing with comparative measurement). Even within the same nation or the same cultural group, differences in such personal characteristics as socioeconomic status, age, gender, and education potentially affect the manner in which respondents interpret and respond to probes concerning their attitudes, beliefs, behavior, or health. These problems are magnified when one adds differences in language and culture to the mix of factors that potentially influence self-reported information.2 The fundamental problem arises from the fact that the privileged world of subjective experience can only be inferred by an observer from external indicators that, in the case of research instruments, are constructed on the basis of assumptions concerning cognitive processes or schemas grounded in the researcher's own culture. These may or may not reflect the cognitive realities of another culture. Proving crosscultural comparability is a challenge to the researcher, but it is a clear imperative. Quantification in heath research inherently rests on the assumption that human experience is largely comparable at least across some range of social and cultural distinctions and that individuals from different cultures can be scored on some common interval-level latent metric related to the phenomena under study. An extreme position in terms of comparison across cultures would hold that all human experience can be translated into a common set of basic cognitive and linguistic constructs and that those can be quantified. Such an assumption requires unambiguous proof, and the degree of comparability of concepts and measurement must be established on the basis of some adequate theoretical and empiric practice. The challenge arises in defining what such an adequate practice might be or perhaps whether any procedure can adequately assure meaningful quantitative comparisons at all. Statistical models can identify significant but small effects that can easily reflect measurement artifacts. A quick perusal of the literature reveals that authors commonly quantify the answers to questions about religious and other highly personal beliefs and relate those to self-reported health practices and outcomes. What is actually demonstrated even in one cultural group by such associations is often unclear. When the probes are asked to individuals from very different social classes and cultures in different languages, the results are uninterpretable. In crosscultural research, what has come to be accepted as common practice, or even considered necessary, is often not based on validated methodological procedures. For example, although back-translation has become the norm for the development of crosscultural measurement instruments, its value for improving validity has never been demonstrated. Back-translation represents a convention, and professional translators are

Proprioceptive-state expressions in Thai

While the structure consisting of a topic and a clausal comment, often referred to as the double-topic, double-subject, or double-nominative sentence, has been discussed in the literature, the internal constituent order within the comment has rarely been a target of study of linguistic typology. The purpose of the paper is to compare two constituent order possibilities found in Thai and other Southeast Asian languages to argue specific constructional meanings associated with them. In Thai, the topic with a clausal comment is used when a body-part is involved, and it may take the form of either [ N1 [ N2 V ]] or [ N1 [ V N2 ]]. In this structure, the topic (N1) is a possessor of N2 (= body-part), and the comment is a clause consisting of an intransitive verb (V) and a body-part noun (N2). These two constituent orders are distributed between the external-state and proprioceptive (internal) state. Thus physical sensations (e.g. “I have a headache”) and emotions (e.g. “I am sad”) are expressed with the [VN] structure in the comment, while the description of external-states such as physical appearances (e.g. “My head is big”) is expressed with [NV]. Since proprioceptive states can only be experienced directly by the experiencer himself and contrast with external states which can be observed by anyone, the constituent order reflects fundamentally different cognitive realities experienced by the speaker. I claim that the [VN] order has a structural meaning of “proprioceptively registered experience” in the Thai grammar. This explains further why some other internal events such as “recovering from cold” or “exhausting one’s physical strength” which do not directly involve body parts also take the [VN] order in the comment. I will also argue that the initial noun (N1) in the proprioceptive-state expression is a topic noun added to the more fundamental topicless structure, [VN], whereas the initial noun in the external-state description is an integral part of the basic argument structure. Finally, I will situate the distributional pattern of [VN] and [NV] found in Thai among other East and Southeast Asian languages.

Of Small Things Remembered: Beads, Cowries, and Cultural Translations of the Atlantic Experience in Yorubaland

the ways that Atlantic imports were used as objects of cultural and political capital, altering the physical and cognitive realities of the people, and the impact of the sheer volume and new varieties of commodities on cultural transformations are questions rarely asked in the history of Atlantic Africa, especially in the Bight of Benin, between Allada/Dahomey in the wvest and the Benin Kingdom in the east. Rather, there has been a tendency in the historiography towards an instrumentalist economic approach in which the impact of the Atlantic economy on Africa and the importance of Africa to the Atlantic economy are reduced to dollar/pound values. These approaches often lead to facile questions and analyses that ignore or gloss over the lived Atlantic experience in African societies.3 This instrumental reasoning underlies David Eltis's argument that the slave and

Neither Fire nor Ice: Postmodern Revisions of America's Post-Cold War Apocalyptic Nightmare

On March 6, 1990, The Bulletin ofAtomic Scientists set back its famous Doomsday Clock, signifying, for the first time in many years, that we had moved away from, rather than closer to, the horrors of a nuclear midnight. Just as this long-awaited adjustment of the clock signaled the brighter dawn of a post-Cold War world, so too did it offer mute testimony to the pervasive presence ofmetaphoric imagery in the discourses ofArmageddon. However, as the fears ofnuclear annihuation diminish, so does the cultural dominance of the imagery with which it was associated, thereby making room for new, post-Cold War anxieties and iconographies. Indeed, much ofthe imagery with which these new neuroses are now routinely associated made its debut during the last decades of East-West atomic anxiety. Consequently, many ofthe narratives that first explored and exploited these now-contemporary concerns and images are not recent works, nor postmodernist per se. However, they are informed by similar sensitivities to the uncertainty, incoherence, and incipient chaos that problematizes contemporary attempts to retotalize our cultural and cognitive realities. Towards a Typology ofNew Armageddons In the wake ofthe Cold War, the thoroughly depopulated cities ofStanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959), along with Arch Oboler's Five (1951), Ranald MacDougall's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), and Mick Jackson's Threads (1984), have become increasingly anachronistic previsions, fading along with the memory ofthe Soviet Union, its rapidly deteriorating strategic arsenal, and the hair-trigger anxieties ofa world eternaUy poised on the brink ofseU-immolation. Ofcourse, the image of the bomb has not entirely left us, but it has undergone a change in social valence. Nuclear weapons are now increasingly associated with terrorist activity, thereby engendering a narrative trend in which the atomic bomb is no longer represented as a globe-smashing behemoth, but as a backpack-sized expression of radical—or Third World—wrath and vengeance. However, even as the scope and danger ofnuclear weapons shrink, new technologies of mass-destruction loom large in our immediate future. The toxic terrorism conducted in Japanese subways is only a minuscule precursor ofgreater dangers, according to a swelling tide oftexts obsessed with biological and ecological catastrophes. New images have begun evolving to replace the old mushroom-cloud specter of nuclear decimation. We are now invited, often urged, to refocus our fears upon

PROCESSES OF MANAGING STRATEGIC CHANGE

The propositions and arguments from a study of the management of strategic change are summarised, and the argument that an understanding of the cultural and cognitive realities of strategic management is central to the process is put forward.

The Relevance of Ethnic Awareness to Affective Education: Implications for Drug Educators

Affective education's goals can be sabotaged by unrecognized ethnicism in the teacher, the school, or the materials used. Teacher/facilitators of affective strategies should develop a sensitivity to all types of ethnicism, become aware of the cognitive and affective realities of other ethnic groups, and work toward programs which are free of ethnic discrimination, whether overt or covert. After looking at these issues this paper then considers the implications and concerns of ethnic awareness which are specific to drug education.