Familiar Categories Research Articles

Musical expertise modulates the effects of visual perceptual load

Several studies have demonstrated that faces are processed differently from other types of objects, implicating a special role that faces have within the human visual system. However, other studies have suggested that faces may be special only in that they constitute a highly familiar category of visual objects with which most humans have expertise. In this study, we tested a group of expert musicians with a musical instrument classification task during which irrelevant images of musical instruments were presented as visual distractors under varying conditions of perceptual load. Unlike nonmusicians (who had been tested in Lavie, Ro, & Russell, 2003, using the same paradigm as in the present study), the musicians processed these irrelevant images of musical instruments even under conditions of high perceptual load. These results suggest that musical instruments are processed automatically and without capacity limits in subjects with musical expertise and implicate a specialized processing mechanism for objects of high familiarity.

Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic

In Uneven Encounters, the forthcoming book from which this article is excerpted, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and she demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back-and-forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation are constructed together, by both non-elites and elites, and gleaned from global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones. Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of self as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far but who absorbed ideas from abroad nonetheless. African American vaudeville artists saw the utility of pretending to “be” Brazilian to cross the color line on stage. Putting on “nation drag,” they passed not from one race to another but out of familiar racial categories entirely. Afro-Brazilian journalists reported intensively on foreign, particularly North American, news and eventually entered into conversation with the U.S. black press in a collaborative but still conflictual dialogue. Seigel suggests that projects comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formations transcend national borders; attempts to understand them must do the same.

Self assembly of inorganic nanocrystals in 3D supra crystals: Intrinsic properties

Here we describe how arrangements of nanocrystals can self-organize in 3D arrays called supra crystals. The 3D arrays can fall into the familiar categories of face centered cubic (fcc), hexagonal compact packing (hcp) crystals, and body centered (bcc) crystals. Intrinsic collective properties of these 3D arrangements are different from the properties of individual nanoparticles and from particles in bulk. We demonstrate by two various processes and with two types of nanocrystals (silver and cobalt) that when nanocrystals are self ordered in 3D superlattices, they exhibit a coherent breathing mode vibration of the supra crystal, analogous to a breathing mode vibration of atoms in a nanocrystal. Comparison between the approaches to saturation of the magnetic curve for supra crystals and disordered aggregates produced from the same batch of nanocrystals is similar to that observed with films or nanoparticles either highly crystallized or amorphous.

OTRA VEZ EL DESEO: PARA PENSAR LA ENSEÑANZA DE LA FILOSOFÍA

We ask whether, in the light of what we know about desire in general, it is possible to teach the desire for philosophy. We refer to philosophical thoughts about desire and try to answer the question by connecting it to gender studies which enable us to consider less familiar categories. This perspective contributes to build an horizon for contemporary philosophy and its teaching at a time that demands a novel look for the sake of creating the future. For this task we have included several sources from traditional and contemporary philosophy.

The Political Culture of the New West by Jeff Roche

being deemed by some as "themost deplorable event in thehistory ofAmerican ornithology" (p. 30). Still,a pluralist element persisted,with native- and foreign-born Americans alike con tinuing to customize ecosystems with advanta geous creatureswithout regard toorigins. The promises and perils ofbiocontrols were repeat edly tried and tested, as when sparrowswere released against a host of noxious arthropods; yet the war between foreignpredators and their foreign hosts inevitably brought side effects, many of them more transformativethanbefore. With thepassing of decades, some Americans proposed that the sparrow be naturalized, so pervasive were its effects on Yankee ecosystems. For better orworse, this winged Brithad come to stay, despite eugenic conservationists' efforts at itsexpulsion. Friends of sparrows considered itonly fairthatthe featheredforeignerreceivea "square deal in theLand ofLiberty,"regardless of how much ecological havoc itwreaked (p. 57). Invasion biologists (and historian Alfred Crosby) have subsequently attributed sparrow success to itsmarvelous adaptability to the human-dominated environment of roadway, hedgerow, citypark, and tilledfield ? condi tions long true fortheEnglish countryside and recentlytruefortheAmerican one. But Coates complicates this explanation by reminding us that ragweed and redwood and grey squirrel have been America's own contentious gifts to the restof theworld, so that there must be more to invasion biology than an alien's ability to thrive in a humanized world. Western readers will find Coates's pages especially discerning, because his tale runs westward as it runs to the present, reflecting the trails of Euro-American co-invaders and the fact thatmore of thenation's biodiversity is harbored in the West. More single species are found in the Pacific states than any other American region,with correspondinglymore interestshown therebynative-species enthusi asts, and more aversion to such invading aliens as eucalyptus, aka "The Universal Australian" (pp. 123-150).Nevertheless, biodiversity enthu siasts occasionally acknowledge that alien crea tures have increased arboreal, entomological, and ornithological diversity in North America, because such aliens can augment local floras and faunas. In the end, Coates has given us a remarkably nuanced and richly researched overview of U.S. attitudes toward alien species, providing an eminently readable account about how Americans have come toview thisforeign element in theirforests,fields,waterways, and flyways. Marcus Hall University ofUtah THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF THENEW WEST editedbyJeff Roche foreword by David F?rber University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2008. Illustrations, photographs, notes, index. 396 pages. $40.00 cloth. $24.95 paper. This very interestingvolume brings together twelve essays originally presented at a sympo sium sponsored by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. The Clements Center, which dates to 1996, has rapidly become an important focusing agent forhistorical schol arship about a broadly conceived Southwest that stretches from the sandy shores of the Gulf ofMexico to the sometimes precipitous coast of California, and these essays enhance its reputation. Editor Jeff Roche and theassembled authors are all engaged in an effortto look behind the voting returns at the basic values and social patterns that underlie electoral politics. The common concept is "political culture," a term that tends tomake political scientists uneasy (how do youmeasure it?)but thatmay bring smiles to the facesofhistorians because we get to talkabout "soft"topics such as the meanings 304 OHQ vol. no, no. 2 ofBarryGoldwater's cowboy hat or thepoliti cal implications ofhip entrepreneurialism ? la Patagonia clothing. Several of the chapters take a new look at a familiar historical category. Douglas Hurt draws on his expertise in agricultural history todescribe the transformation of agricultural policy inwhich claims forprotection by small farmers were appropriated by agricultural industrialists. Ignacio Garcia examines Latino political culture, Bradley Shreve looks at the rise of a national political movement among American Indians, and Scott Tang explores the tangled racial politics of post-World War II San Francisco. Another group of scholarsprobe the ways in which ideas of "West" and "westernness" have affectedpolitical life. Robert Goldberg follows his earlierbiography of BarryGoldwater with a fascinatingdiscussion of theway Goldwater and Ronald Reagan defined themselves as ruggedwesterners asmuch by their choice of clothing (those cowboy hats) as their actual policy choices, a trope thatGeorge W. Bush utilized somewhat less convincingly. In a very different way, as Karen Merrill points out, the image and self-imageof the"Texaswildcatter" as...

A Qualitative Examination of Perceptions of Physical Activity Guidelines and Preferences for Format

A descriptive exploratory study was conducted to gain an understanding of public perceptions of physical activity guidelines and to discover what formats appeal to participants. Canada's Physical Activity Guide (CPAG) was used as an example of such guidelines. Data were collected from 22 participants in five focus groups (composed of female undergraduate students, female office workers, male office workers, participants in a Type II diabetes rehabilitation program, and participants in a cardiovascular rehabilitation program). Cross-case qualitative analyses were conducted. Six themes emerged under the general categories of familiarity and preferences for PA promotional materials. In terms of familiarity, participants lacked awareness of CPAG and criticized its format. In terms of preferences, participants encouraged the use of stylistically similar messaging to those used by commercial advertisers, wanted personal stories, Internet-based media, and the use of celebrities' success stories. There was little awareness of CPAG and the current format was unappealing.

Supracrystals of Inorganic Nanocrystals: An Open Challenge for New Physical Properties

When naturally occurring spherical objects self-organize, the physical properties of the material change. For example, a colorless opal is the result of a disordered aggregate of silica particles. When the silica particles are ordered, however, the opal takes on color, which is determined by the size of the self-assembled particles. In this Account, we describe how these 3D arrangements of nanomaterials can self-organize in 3D arrays called supracrystals; the 3D arrays can fall into the familiar categories of face-centered cubic (fcc), hexagonal compact packing (hcp) crystals, and body-centered (bcc) crystals. The collective properties of these 2D and 3D arrangements are different from the properties of individual nanoparticles and from particles in bulk. Comparison between the approach to saturation of the magnetic curve for supracrystals and disordered aggregates produced from the same batch of nanocrystals is similar to that observed with films or nanoparticles, either highly crystallized or amorphous. We also demonstrate by two various processes and with two types of nanocrystals (silver and cobalt) that when nanocrystals are self-ordered in 3D superlattices, they exhibit a coherent breathing mode vibration of the supracrystal, analogous to a breathing mode vibration of atoms in a nanocrystal. Furthermore, we used 10 nm gamma-Fe(2)O(3) nanocrystals to gain new insight into the scaling law of crack patterns. We found that isotropic and directional crack patterns follow the same universal scaling law over a film height varying by 3 orders of magnitude. These data have led us to propose general analogies between supracrystals of nanocrystals, individual nanocrystals, and the molecules in the bulk phase for certain physical properties based on the ordering of the material. As we continue to study the physical properties of the ordered and disordered arrangements of nanomaterials, we will be able to go further in these analogies. And this exploration leads to new questions: first and foremost, is this behavior general?

Acoustic discrimination and categorization of formant dynamics for novel and familiar stimuli.

Perception of a formant transition continuum from /b/ to /d/ was tested for a high‐fidelity speech continuum and an analogous sinewave speech continuum. Endpoint stimuli were recorded by a male talker, matched for fundamental frequency and duration, and interpolated using a STRAIGHT morphing algorithm to produce a continuum of 11 steps. The first three formants were replaced with sinewaves to create a sinewave speech continuum. This study used a between‐subject paradigm, which enabled comparison of highly familiar natural stimulus categories to novel sinewave stimulus categories while preserving fundamental acoustic cues for perception (the first three formants). Categorization training and discrimination blocks were interleaved during testing to track the effect of category learning on discrimination. Results for sinewave speech failed to demonstrate significant short‐term category learning or a change in discrimination performance across three blocks. However, discrimination and categorization performance were fundamentally different between continua. While discrimination for natural speech was best near the category boundary, participants who heard sinewave speech appeared to use detailed differences in pattern dynamics, resulting in best discrimination near specific stimuli characteristic of the dynamic pattern. Results will be discussed as they relate to categorical perception and category learning. [Work supported by the NIH.]

Maimonides, Aquinas and Ghazali: distinguishing God from world

AbstractThis exploration focuses on Moses ben Maimon's attempt to give philosophical voice to the revelation of the Torah to offer a window into the comparative (though not actually collaborative) efforts of Jewish, Christian and Muslim medieval thinkers to adapt the metaphysical strategies available to them to the hitherto inconceivable task of articulating a creation utterly free, with nothing presupposed to it. Short of a divine revelation, nothing could have suggested such an affirmation, so crafting the adaptations demanded of familiar philosophical categories would require exploiting the illumination inherent in those distinct revelations. Far from being a merely historical exercise, these efforts are presented as object lessons for philosophical theologians today, as we move to show how Aquinas and Ghazali complement Maimonides' way of negotiating recondite regions where reason and faith interact. In that sense, this exercise inspired by medieval thinkers may be dubbed ‘postmodern’, since the deliverances of faith can be seen to be interwoven with rational inquiry and indispensable to its execution. Moreover, their witness can also challenge current ‘philosophers of religion’ who may all too easily presume their categories to be adequate to the task of probing the reaches of religious faith. In this way, the call to transform philosophical strategies in ways not unlike that undertaken by our medieval thinkers can suggest a benign reading of the ‘postmodern’ situation in which we admittedly live.

Country‐of‐origin contingencies

PurposeThis study was undertaken to clarify how product familiarity and product involvement can moderate the importance that consumers place on COO image when they evaluate products for purchase or consumption. The authors adopted a contingency approach and empirically examined, by way of competing hypotheses, the alternative possibilities by which product familiarity and product involvement may influence the importance that consumers place on COO image when they evaluate products.Design/methodology/approachData were gathered from 388 consumers in Australia across four different product classes. Data analysis was conducted using hierarchical regression analysis with interactions and post hoc slope analysis.FindingsOverall, the study findings suggest that the importance that consumers place on COO image when they evaluate products is contingent on the product context. Specifically, the study findings show that consumers consider COO image to be more important for their product evaluations when they evaluate products from less familiar product categories and are less involved with the products that they are evaluating. An additional variable included in the study, product origin congruency, was found to enhance the importance that consumers place on COO image when they evaluate products.Originality/valueThere are competing views in the literature as to how product familiarity and product involvement can moderate the importance that consumers place on COO image when they evaluate products. This study further clarifies the moderating role of product familiarity and product involvement. The study also examines the potential moderating role of product origin congruency in a survey for the first time.

The Edinburgh companion to twentieth-century literatures in English

This book presents a new literary history of the twentieth century, setting a new agenda for literary-historical analysis. Far from the usual forced march through the decades, genres and national literatures, it cuts across familiar categories, focusing instead on literary ‘hot spots’: Freud's Vienna and Conrad's Congo in 1899; Chicago and London in 1912; the Somme in July 1916; Dublin, London and Harlem in 1922; and so on, down to Bradford and Berlin in 1989 (the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the new digital media), Stockholm in 1993 (Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize) and September 11, 2001.

Kinesis and Energeia—and What Follows. Outline of a Typology of Human Actions

This paper presents a typology of human actions, based on Aristotle’s kinesis–energeia dichotomy and on a formal elaboration (with some refinement) of the Vendler–Kenny classificatory schemes for action types (or action verbs). The types introduced are defined throughout by inferential criteria, in terms of what here are referred to as “modal-temporal expressions” (‘MT-terms’). Examples of familiar categories analysed in this way are production and maintenance, but the procedure is meant to offer a basis for defining various other commonsense categories. Among the more theoretical categories introduced are “Aristotelian projects”, i.e. actions defined in terms of Aristotle’s conceptions of movement/change, as well as “abstract projects”, in which the agent ensures that something changes from not being a fact to being a fact, and “conditional agency”, which involves actions that are to be performed when/if certain conditions come to be fulfilled. A category like “starting an action” is itself inferentially defined here in MT-terms, and so, inter alia, are proceeding with, finishing, stopping and interrupting an action. There is also a demonstration of how actions of one type may be converted into those of other types, where this is a matter of the way they are “seen” or described. There is also an implication to the effect that some of these distinctions may be useful for formulating certain critical insights regarding modern life.

Development of Social Category Representations: Early Appreciation of Roles and Deontic Relations

Three experiments explored the significance of deontic properties (involving rights and obligations) in representations of social categories. Preschool-aged children (M = 4.8), young school-aged children (M = 8.2), and adults judged the centrality of behavioral, psychological, and deontic properties for both familiar (Experiments 1 and 2, Ns = 50 and 52, respectively) and novel (Experiment 3, N = 64) social categories. Preschool-aged children were the most consistent in treating deontic properties as central: Knowing a person's social category membership was more informative about obligations than about behavioral frequencies or psychological preferences. Adults treated deontic properties as central to some categories but also recognized a set that was primarily predictive of psychological dispositions. The results argue for the significance of deontic properties in the development of social cognition.

Face Familiarity, Distinctiveness, and Categorical Perception

Four experiments with faces support the original interpretation of categorical perception (CP) as only present for familiar categories. Unlike in the results of Levin and Beale (2000), no evidence is found for face identity CP with unfamiliar faces. Novel face identities were shown to be capable of encoding for immediate sorting purposes but the representations utilized do not have the format of perceptual categories. One possibility explored was that a choice of a distinctive face as an end-point in a morphed continuum can spuriously produce effects that resemble CP. Such morphed continua provided unequal psychological responses to equal physical steps though much more so in a better likeness paradigm than for forced-choice recognition. Thus, researchers doing almost the same experiments may produce very different results and come to radically different conclusions.

Public Choice and the Extent of the Market

SUMMARYIn analyzing political processes, public choice scholars invoke a two‐level choice, choices within rules and constitutional choices among sets of rules. This paper considers rules that set the limits for market choice through the political‐collective action. Three familiar categories of institutional constraints are examined: prohibition, regulation, and taxation‐public spending, that are significant in limiting the trading process. The motivation for institutional‐constitutional construction may originate from sources other than economic objectives. We note that institutional parameters include political and legal constraints, as supplemented by traditions and conventions which may affect choice behavior. We relate the analysis to Adam Smith's vision of the achievement of natural liberty and economic progress through his theorem that economic productivity depends on market size.

Disaster: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis

AbstractDisaster is one of those extraordinary phenomena that is ubiquitous yet indescribable. From supernatural occurrence to earthly force finally yielding to its present day configuration as a social event, disaster offers a unique lens with which to examine history. Beginning in the mid‐twentieth century, scholars set out to examine urban life, race, class, and politics through a variety of socially dislocating events. The historical literature is varied and deep. Conceptions of disaster are seldom the same, and often highlight the strained relationship between social and natural configurations. But historians examining disaster have not advocated a common creed of catastrophe, so much as sharing a familiar lexicon. That language is informed by social scientific literature, environmental studies, and topics such as urban life, race, class and politics. To be sure, the discourse of disaster has been quite supple, bridging disparate units of historical manufacture and blurring familiar categories of analysis. This article surveys the evolution of the term, its usage in American historiography and major scholarly trends. The article concludes with a cri de couer to bring greater visibility to disaster studies.

Fragment-Based Learning of Visual Object Categories

When we perceive a visual object, we implicitly or explicitly associate it with a category we know. It is known that the visual system can use local, informative image fragments of a given object, rather than the whole object, to classify it into a familiar category. How we acquire informative fragments has remained unclear. Here, we show that human observers acquire informative fragments during the initial learning of categories. We created new, but naturalistic, classes of visual objects by using a novel "virtual phylogenesis" (VP) algorithm that simulates key aspects of how biological categories evolve. Subjects were trained to distinguish two of these classes by using whole exemplar objects, not fragments. We hypothesized that if the visual system learns informative object fragments during category learning, then subjects must be able to perform the newly learned categorization by using only the fragments as opposed to whole objects. We found that subjects were able to successfully perform the classification task by using each of the informative fragments by itself, but not by using any of the comparable, but uninformative, fragments. Our results not only reveal that novel categories can be learned by discovering informative fragments but also introduce and illustrate the use of VP as a versatile tool for category-learning research.

Gender Transgression as Heresy: The Trial of Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc has exercised a hold on the imagination, both medieval and modern, far exceeding her limited military achievements. It is perhaps for this reason that the trial of Joan on charges of heresy, culminating in her conviction and execution, is typically interpreted in a cynical light. The primary theme of the literature is that the she was brought to trial and convicted for challenging the institutionalized power of state and church. The issue of gender transgression, which is repeated throughout the transcripts of Joan’s trial, is either ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. It is typical of the medieval narrative that belief systems no longer accepted today are not taken seriously, and this is done through reducing them to familiar categories.
 
 This paper aims to take the trial of Joan of Arc seriously by arguing that Joan really was a heretic because she was different from orthodox Christians in that she transgressed traditional gender roles. This issue played a major role in Joan’s trial and one can scarcely read two paragraphs of the record without issues of gender transgression being raised and denounced. Furthermore, gender transgression was explicitly identified as amounting to heresy, and theological arguments were given by learned experts to justify this connection. This is not to deny that Joan was a heretic on other grounds; her obstinate refusal to submit herself to the Church militant and insistence on her ability to interpret her own revelations are crucial issues. Likewise, we do not intend to deny the political aspect of her trial, but rather to argue that the defense and reinforcement of traditional authority structures cannot be demarcated from the issue of heresy and gender transgression.

Effects of Familiarity on Neural Activity in Monkey Inferior Temporal Lobe

Long-term familiarity facilitates recognition of visual stimuli. To better understand the neural basis for this effect, we measured the local field potential (LFP) and multiunit spiking activity (MUA) from the inferior temporal (IT) lobe of behaving monkeys in response to novel and familiar images. In general, familiar images evoked larger amplitude LFPs whereas MUA responses were greater for novel images. Familiarity effects were attenuated by image rotations in the picture plane of 45 degrees. Decreasing image contrast led to more pronounced decreases in LFP response magnitude for novel, compared with familiar images, and resulted in more selective MUA response profiles for familiar images. The shape of individual LFP traces could be used for stimulus classification, and classification performance was better for the familiar image category. Recording the visual and auditory evoked LFP at multiple depths showed significant alterations in LFP morphology with distance changes of 2 mm. In summary, IT cortex shows local processing differences for familiar and novel images at a time scale and in a manner consistent with the observed behavioral advantage for classifying familiar images and rapidly detecting novel stimuli.

The Effect of Vocabulary Size on Toddlers' Receptiveness to Unexpected Testimony About Category Membership

Children must be willing to accept some of what they hear "on faith," even when that testimony conflicts with their own expectations. The study reported here investigated the relation among vocabulary size, object recognition, and 24-month-olds' (N = 40) willingness to accept potentially surprising testimony about the category to which an object belongs. Results showed that children with larger vocabularies were better able to recognize atypical exemplars of familiar categories than children with smaller vocabularies. However, they were also most likely to accept unexpected testimony that an object that looked like a member of one familiar category was actually a member of another. These results indicate that 24-month-olds trust classifications provided by adult labeling patterns even when they conflict with the classifications children generate on their own.