Iconic Representations Research Articles

Symbolic representations and cardinal knowledge in 3- and 4-year-old children

This study analyzes the impact of iconic representations of quantity (objects and images) and arbitrary representations (spoken number words) on the performance of 3-, 3.5- and 4-year-old children when building collections of 1–6 items. We used an adaptation of the Give-N task in which children had to use the information about quantity transmitted by collections of bottle caps, round dots on cards and number words. The results show that iconic representations helped children produce sets which cardinal values were larger than their known number words. This pattern of results was found in a transitional stage to learning that a given number word picks out an exact cardinal value, for set sizes 3 and 4 among children in all three age groups. These findings suggest that children would be in different (but proximal) levels of cardinal competency according to the symbolic modality employed to present the quantitative information.

Chatterjee, S.C. and Sengupta, S.Death and Dying in India: Ageing and End‐of‐Life Care of the Elderly, London and New York: Routledge. 2017. 162 pp. £105.00 (hbk) ISBN: 9780415403177 £20 (eBook) ISBN: 9781315228884

Chatterjee, S.C. and Sengupta, S.Death and Dying in India: Ageing and End‐of‐Life Care of the Elderly, London and New York: Routledge. 2017. 162 pp. £105.00 (hbk) ISBN: 9780415403177 £20 (eBook) ISBN: 9781315228884

Market/society: mapping conceptions of power, ideology and subjectivity in Polanyi, Hayek, Foucault, Lukács

ABSTRACT In light of discussions around the common anniversary of the publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, this article puts these texts – iconic representations of social democratic and neoliberal political theory – into conversation with Michel Foucault’s subsequent, influential critique of neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics. There are interesting points of contact in the way each text constructs its argument, even as they arrive at distinct positions vis-à-vis the material and subjective nature of market society, while nevertheless sharing an opposition to Marxian approaches. Yet the work of Polanyi and Hayek’s Marxian contemporary, Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, offers precisely a critical framework for understanding the relationship between markets, liberty and society in which the material and the subjective need not be read as antagonistic. It is thus also examined here, in an effort to shed light on how discussions of contemporary neoliberalism are framed.

From reading numbers to seeing ratios: a benefit of icons for risk comprehension.

Promoting a better understanding of statistical data is becoming increasingly important for improving risk comprehension and decision-making. In this regard, previous studies on Bayesian problem solving have shown that iconic representations help infer frequencies in sets and subsets. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which icons enhance performance remain unclear. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the benefit offered by icon arrays lies in a better alignment between presented and requested relationships, which should facilitate the comprehension of the requested ratio beyond the represented quantities. To this end, we analyzed individual risk estimates based on data presented either in standard verbal presentations (percentages and natural frequency formats) or as icon arrays. Compared to the other formats, icons led to estimates that were more accurate, and importantly, promoted the use of equivalent expressions for the requested probability. Furthermore, whereas the accuracy of the estimates based on verbal formats depended on their alignment with the text, all the estimates based on icons were equally accurate. Therefore, these results support the proposal that icons enhance the comprehension of the ratio and its mapping onto the requested probability and point to relational misalignment as potential interference for text-based Bayesian reasoning. The present findings also argue against an intrinsic difficulty with understanding single-event probabilities.

China’s double body: infrastructure routes and the mapping of China’s nation-state and civilization-state

ABSTRACTIn contemporary China, there are two cartographies that underlie geographical imaginations of China’s political, economic, and cultural nature. The first is the geobody, a bordered notion of the state that stresses national territorial integrity and draws attention to historical territorial transgressions. The second is the civilization-state, a cartography that stresses extensive civilizational connection over national borders and which draws from China’s ancient cosmopolitan heritage and projected developmental future. This article analyzes the cartographies and attendant discourses of the geobody and civilization-state as iconic representations that speak to different ontologies of China. Analyzing China’s double body reveals two drastically different expectations about borders and infrastructure connectivity. Today and in the early years of the Chinese nation, maps of China’s internal railway network have supported nationalist calls for territorial security and promoted the idea of the Chinese geobody. Contemporary maps of the civilization-state, however, stress an unbounded China looking to enrich its neighbors through cultural exchange, road and railway expansion, and Belt and Road Initiative infrastructural connection. This article argues that these cartographies are not reducible to one another and that geographers should take seriously the affective work of maps beyond that of the geobody in critical geopolitical analysis.Abbreviation: BRI: Belt and Road Initiative

Examining Teachers’ Knowledge of Line Graph Task: a Case of Travel Task

Teachers should possess a robust knowledge of graph interpretation in a world that requires increasingly scientific citizens. This study aimed to investigate teachers’ knowledge of interpreting a context-based line graph, by understanding the types of difficulties teachers have in interpreting such graphs. The study also sought to determine whether there were gender differences in teachers’ graph interpretation skills and determine whether these interpretation skills were different among teachers with varying teaching experiences. Sixty-one teachers from ten districts in one Indonesian province participated in this study. Empirically derived items were developed to identify the teacher’s conceptual understanding of line graphs with Curcio’s (Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 18(5), 382–393, 1987) level of interpretation applied to explain the difficulties encountered. This study revealed that most of the teachers had difficulty answering questions that required ‘reading beyond the data’. Specifically, these teachers interpreted the graph as an iconic representation of a real event rather than an abstract representation of data (i.e., speed vs. time). Performance differences in teachers’ understanding of the graph were dependent on the grade level they taught, with differences especially evident in the interpretation of moderate and difficult items. There were no differences in teachers’ understanding by gender or years of teaching experience. The results highlight the importance of focusing on teacher professional development centering on teachers’ knowledge of graph comprehension.

The Ancestral Room of the State? Scotland and the United Kingdom on Jamie’s Great Britain

This article analyzes how Jamie Oliver’s show Jamie’s Great Britain represented Scotland in 2012, when the referendum on Scottish independence had already been announced. It follows Anderson, Bourdieu, Bhabha, cultural studies, and the idea that the nation is a hegemonic construction. Biosemiotics provides useful perspectives on the representations of Nature and Culture. Semiotic analysis interprets representations of the nation on the show. The results show that, while Oliver identifies English and Welsh food cultural origins with the Industrial Revolution and the Coal Boom, respectively, he finds Scotland’s food origins in the Vikings. Scotland is a land of ancestral habits and people, where Nature is inhospitable. Oliver represents England and Wales through the cultural categories of indices and symbols, while crude iconic representations of Nature are used to depict Scotland. Moreover, the Vikings also originated England and Wales (and Ireland), and in the end, the Vikings are constructed as the common roots of the nation that Oliver celebrates, the United Kingdom. Thus, Scotland is only represented as a part of the state-nation, a kind of ancestral room of the big house of the United Kingdom.

Spazi mediali delle migrazioni. Framing e rappresentazioni del confine nell’informazione italiana

Abstract – Media play a central role in the process of symbolic and social construction of reality; the news trace the outlines of the spaces defining the identities – who is in , the belonging, who is the other , as well as the explanatory dimensions and the attributions of responsibility that prelude the formation of public policies – what happens and what should be done . In the decades-long experience of Italy and other advanced countries, this role is particularly evident in the representation of migratory phenomena. Many researches, over the years, have investigated the ability or (more often) the inability of journalism to read the complexity of this phenomenon, providing a panorama drawn by some consolidated frames, a repertoire of recurring images, iconic representations of the foreigner, of the ‘evil’, of the ‘enemy’ and of the ‘different’. Given the diversification of situations, events, political-institutional frameworks, this landscape maintains consistency in the construction of a discursive space that regenerates national and community membership and legitimate policies of exclusion. Adopting a sociological perspective on communication and media studies, the contribution explores the contours of this cultural horizon through data and case histories from empirical paths and the international literature on the subject. Our conclusion is that there are three prevalent frames – ‘security’, ‘crisis’, ‘pietistic’ – in which iconic, linguistic and metaphorical apparatuses define the most common interpretative keys in the journalistic representation of the migratory phenomenon.

Refugees as icons: Culture and iconic representation

AbstractThe September 2015 photograph of Alan Kurdi, a 3‐year‐old Syrian boy, lying facedown and dead on a Turkish beach, quickly became an iconic representation of Europe's “refugee crisis.” Even though images of distant suffering of refugees have become ubiquitous, only a few become iconic. It is this cultural process of iconization that often bedevils sociologists interested in visuality. How does an image gain the necessary currency to sway public opinion or even policy making? Why do some photographs elicit profound compassion that transcends the borders of its particular context? In this review, we explore how various authors have addressed these questions, focusing on the iconic images of Alan Kurdi. The “iconic turn” in cultural sociology and in the social sciences more broadly speaking offers theoretical and methodological insights for the analysis of images such as those depicting refugees and asylum seekers. For this reason, we situate the current work in the field of refugee photography within the framework of cultural sociology, even if many of the scholars discussed are from other disciplines.

IN SEARCH OF THE ORIGINS OF ISRAELITE ANICONISM

For a long time, aniconism has been presented as one of the most distinctive characteristics of the religion of ancient Israel. Aniconism refers to the absence or repudiation of divine images. Such a tradition was inconceivable to Israel’s neighbours, where the care, feeding, and clothing of a deity, represented in the form of a divine statue, played a central role in national cults (Jacobsen 1987:15-32; Berlejung 1997:45-72; Walker & Dick 2001; Roth 1992:113-147; Roth 1993:57-79). The issue of aniconism has, therefore, been the subject of much scholarly debate. In discussing the concept of aniconism, this article follows Mettinger’s (1995:18) distinction between de facto aniconism (the mere absence of iconic representations of a deity) and programmatic aniconism (the repudiation of such representations). Many theories on the origins of the strong aniconic tradition in Yahwism have been put forward. Some major theories will be critically reviewed, and a new synthesis with reference to archaeological and iconographic data will be presented.

Making Visual Rhetoric More Difficult

Making Visual Rhetoric More Difficult

Location-coding account versus affordance-activation account in handle-to-hand correspondence effects: Evidence of Simon-like effects based on the coding of action direction.

An increasing number of studies have shown a close link between perception and action, which is supposed to be responsible for the automatic activation of actions compatible with objects' properties, such as the orientation of their graspable parts. It has been observed that left and right hand responses to objects (e.g., cups) are faster and more accurate if the handle orientation corresponds to the response location than when it does not. Two alternative explanations have been proposed for this handle-to-hand correspondence effect: location coding and affordance activation. The aim of the present study was to provide disambiguating evidence on the origin of this effect by employing object sets for which the visually salient portion was separated from, and opposite to the graspable 1, and vice versa. Seven experiments were conducted employing both single objects and object pairs as visual stimuli to enhance the contextual information about objects' graspability and usability. Notwithstanding these manipulations intended to favor affordance activation, results fully supported the location-coding account displaying significant Simon-like effects that involved the orientation of the visually salient portion of the object stimulus and the location of the response. Crucially, we provided evidence of Simon-like effects based on higher-level cognitive, iconic representations of action directions rather than based on lower-level spatial coding of the pure position of protruding portions of the visual stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record

Plasticity and Convergence in the Evolution of Short-Necked Plesiosaurs

Plesiosaurs were the longest-surviving group of secondarily marine tetrapods, comparable in diversity to today's cetaceans. During their long evolutionary history, which spanned the Jurassic and the Cretaceous (201 to 66 Ma), plesiosaurs repeatedly evolved long- and short-necked body plans [1, 2]. Despite this postcranial plasticity, short-necked plesiosaur clades have traditionally been regarded as being highly constrained to persistent and clearly distinct ecological niches: advanced members of Pliosauridae (ranging from the Middle Jurassic to the early Late Cretaceous) have been characterized as apex predators [2-5], whereas members of the distantly related clade Polycotylidae (middle to Late Cretaceous) were thought to have been fast-swimming piscivores [1, 5-7]. We report a new, highly unusual pliosaurid from the Early Cretaceous of Russia that shows close convergencewith the cranial structure of polycotylids: Luskhan itilensis gen. et sp. nov. Using novel cladistic and ecomorphological data, we show that pliosaurids iteratively evolved polycotylid-like cranial morphologies from the Early Jurassic until the EarlyCretaceous. This underscores the ecological diversity of derived pliosaurids and reveals a more complex evolutionary history than their iconic representation as gigantic apex predators of Mesozoic marine ecosystems suggests. Collectively, these data demonstrate an even higher degree of morphological plasticity and convergence in the evolution of plesiosaurs than previously thought and suggest the existence of an optimal ecomorphology for short-necked piscivorous plesiosaurs through time and across phylogeny.

Introduction: Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words.

Drawing an Unwritten Common Law: The Normative Pictograms of Christiania

If we exclude a few very specific fields, such as the traffic sign system, pictorial normative representation does not seem to play an important role in legal communication. In this paper, I will illustrate an example of pictorial normative representation expressing a set of norms that are fundamental to a community's very existence: this is the case of Christiania Freetown's Common Law. Christiania is a self-proclaimed autonomous neighbourhood located in the centre of Copenhagen. The norms of Christiania's Common Law are pictorially represented and displayed on a number of posters throughout Christiania's territory. These normative images prima facie appear to share certain features with traffic signs, despite the fact that, as the examples will make it clear, they are different in kind. Indeed, while the physical support of a traffic sign and its location are a necessary condition for the norm to be binding, Christiania's Common Law seems to be in force independently of its iconic representation and its concrete material support. On the other hand, even if the meanings of the different pictograms are not connected with the physical place in which they are located, their deeper meaning can only be fully understood on the basis of Christiania's cultural and institutional background.

Iconic faces are not real faces: enhanced emotion detection and altered neural processing as faces become more iconic.

Iconic representations are ubiquitous; they fill children’s cartoons, add humor to newspapers, and bring emotional tone to online communication. Yet, the communicative function they serve remains unaddressed by cognitive psychology. Here, we examined the hypothesis that iconic representations communicate emotional information more efficiently than their realistic counterparts. In Experiment 1, we manipulated low-level features of emotional faces to create five sets of stimuli that ranged from photorealistic to fully iconic. Participants identified emotions on briefly presented faces. Results showed that, at short presentation times, accuracy for identifying emotion on more “cartoonized” images was enhanced. In addition, increasing contrast and decreasing featural complexity benefited accuracy. In Experiment 2, we examined an event-related potential component, the P1, which is sensitive to low-level visual stimulus features. Lower levels of contrast and complexity within schematic stimuli were also associated with lower P1 amplitudes. These findings support the hypothesis that iconic representations differ from realistic images in their ability to communicate specific information, including emotion, quickly and efficiently, and that this effect is driven by changes in low-level visual features in the stimuli.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41235-016-0021-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Learning to pray the Pentecostal way: language and personhood on the Zambian Copperbelt

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role of prayer in the production of the Pentecostal person on the Zambian Copperbelt. While Pentecostal prayer is partly focused on private concerns, and therefore reinforces a classic Protestant notion of bounded, individualised personhood, success in this practice depends on a believer’s ability to incorporate the language of the Pentecostal community. Prayer is also therefore dependent on a model of personhood in which permeability has an important part to play. One of the implications of this latter element of Pentecostal prayer is that it turns individual believers into iconic representations of their communities.

Effects of 3D CAD applications on the design creativity of students with different representational abilities

The purpose of the present study was to elucidate the auxiliary effects that the application of three-dimensional computer-aided design (3D-CAD) had on students’ creative design, and the differences in the effects of 3D-CAD on students with different representational abilities (RAs). An unequal-group pretest-posttest quasi-experiment design was developed to analyze 215 students studying in an anonymous senior high school in Taipei City, Taiwan. The findings of the present study were as follows:1. The students' RAs achieved a moderate and positive correlation with their creative performance (CP), with increased correlation between RAs and the functionality and expressiveness constructs of CP and CP with the iconic representation (IR) construct of RAs.2. 3D-CAD evidently improved the students' CP, particularly their expressiveness and functionality.3. During 3D-CAD intervention, the students with low RAs performed similarly to those with high RAs in terms of novelty and expressiveness.

Nationalism, Britishness and the ‘Souring’ of Australian National Art

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the nationalist historiography of the Heidelberg School, an Australian art movement from the Federation period, known for its iconic representations of national life and landscape. Drawing on recent scholarship of Australian nationalism, it questions conventional accounts of the Heidelberg School in Australian art history, especially those based on Bernard Smith’s radical interpretation of this movement. For Bernard Smith, and the generations of Australian art historians he influenced, the nationalism of the 1890s was a progressive force for national culture. Yet, in the post-Federation decades, national art declined (or ‘soured’) into a reactionary form of insular nationalism. By focusing on the ‘souring’ narrative of Australian national art, this article critiques the nationalist interpretation of the Heidelberg School. It explores an apparent contradiction: the role of Britishness in the construction of a distinctly Australian national art.

SPerceived Image of the Jeju Island Dolhareubang: Implications for Online Destination Image in Korea using Q Method

Almost all Koreans recognize the Dolhareubang as a representative symbol of Jeju. However, as the development of online technology progressed, the image and perception of the Dolhareubang is also expected to change. Thus, this study explored the perceived images of Dolhareubang by focusing on residents in Seoul, Korea using Q methodology. The goal of this research was to evaluate this iconic representation of Jeju as an important component of the island’s online tourism destination image. The Q-set was developed from existing literature and defined conceptually in terms of ‘value’, ‘resource’, ‘story’, and ‘image’. Thirty five respondents were recruited as P set. Findings indicated four distinctive clusters that perceived the Dolhareubang differently and differences in perceptions were observed in terms of age. The examination of destination image and the exploration of the perceptions of Dolharuebang as a representative of Jeju could contribute to online destination image management or development, which is a crucial component of smart tourism.