Mental Context Research Articles

EEG-based Incongruency Decoding in AR with sLDA, SVM, and EEGNet

Abstract Augmented reality (AR) technologies enhance a user’s physical environment by providing contextual information about their surroundings. This information might appear incongruent to users, either due to their current mental context or factual errors in the data. This paper explores the feasibility of incongruency decoding using electroencephalographic (EEG) signals from 19 participants acquired during an interactive AR task. Previous studies on single-trial N400 decoding for brain-computer interfaces using EEG data are limited. Therefore, we implemented commonly used classification approaches and assessed their decoding performance compared to the convolutional neural network EEGNet. We found that the investigated approaches offer comparable accuracies ranging from 63.3% to 64.8%. Successful decoding of incongruency effects can foster more contextually appropriate interactions within AR environments.

Intentional forgetting in younger and older adolescents

AbstractIntentional forgetting exhibits limited efficacy in children but demonstrates resilience in adults. This study aimed to explore the developmental trends and underlying mechanisms of intentional forgetting in adolescents. Students from grades 7th and 9th were recruited to perform the modified list‐method directed forgetting (DF, Experiment 1) and selective directed forgetting (SDF, Experiment 2) tasks. In Experiment 1, both graders showed typical DF effects. The 9th graders forgot more List 1 compared to the 7th graders in the forgetting condition, indicating a stronger DF ability for the former group. In Experiment 2, an SDF effect was observed for the 9th graders but was absent for the 7th graders. Additionally, a weaker forgetting effect was induced by imagining cues relative to forgetting cues in both experiments. These results demonstrated that DF and SDF abilities in adolescents improved with age and might be mediated by inhibitory control rather than changes in mental context.

Say it out loud: Does mental context reinstatement out loud benefit immediate and delayed memory recall?

AbstractMental context reinstatement (MCR) is a key part of the cognitive interview. However, police face challenges delivering MCR in real‐life situations. Over the years, modifications have been made to make MCR more user‐friendly for officers and ensure witness engagement. The current study evaluates the impact of vocalizing MCR generations aloud on mock‐witness's immediate and delayed recollections. Participants watched a staged multiple‐car collision and were interviewed about it the next day. Half verbalized mental images aloud (aMCR), while the other half kept them silent in their minds (cMCR). After a week, participants took part in a delayed recall attempt. No significant differences in immediate recall performance were found. During the delayed recall, participants who engaged in aMCR previously recalled significantly more and more correct details than those who received cMCR. aMCR might lead to more coherent representations in working memory, resulting in improved consolidation and better future recall.

Who Are You Really? A Philosopher’s Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Persons

Who Are You Really? A Philosopher’s Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Persons

Research field of demographic security in the multi-ethnic space of narratives of students

The demographic situation in Russia is characterized by a persistently narrowed type of population reproduction, which certainly actualizes the study of narratives on demographic security and involves understanding the attitudes and risks associated with demographic behavior. Kazan universities are a good platform for studying the demographic behavior of student youth, where mutual influence of the attitudes of the Turkic world and the Russian mental context occurs. The article discusses the features of using the focus group method in the research field of demographic security, with students of Kazan in a multiethnic youth environment. As a result of conducting 16 cases using the focus group method and based on 50 free interviews with its participants, which were conducted 7 days after each focus group, the key attitudes of demographic behavior (reproductive, self-preservation, migration and matrimonial) of student youth in a multi-ethnic environment were identified and the image of the future in demographic security narratives. The focus group method is presented as a platform that makes it possible to create a certain “meta-story”, where the demographic attitudes of young educated representatives of different ethnic groups are realized, the degree of their compatibility, and a search for ways of a possible joint future is developed..

Effects of mental context reinstatement on accuracy and recollective experience

AbstractObtaining eyewitness accounts after an event can aid criminal investigations. Mental Reinstatement of Context (MRC) is used to improve memory. However, direct comparisons have identified little effects of MRC relative to free delivery with No‐MRC, and little is known about the effects of MRC on subjective memory characteristics and the role of individual differences in autobiographical memory. Here we exposed 234 participants to a naturalistic film and randomly assigned them to either MRC or No‐MRC before requesting written memory reports and memory characteristics ratings. They also answered an autobiographical memory test. MRC participants reported more unverifiable, but not more accurate, details in Free Recall, whereas they performed better in Cued Recall and delivered higher ratings of Reliving, Vividness, Re‐experience, and Emotions, suggesting a richer recall experience, while Belief/confidence and Scene ratings did not differ. Individual differences in autobiographical memory correlated with memory characteristics but not with accuracy performances.

Situated learning, communities of practice and pedagogical innovation

Abstract This article reflects on situated learning as a result of interactions between learners and contexts. It starts from the concept of community and its relationship with the learning processes. The article defines community of practice and recognizes the social and situated nature of cognition. It recognizes that knowledge materializes in the form of situated experiences and not just in mental contexts. It addresses the study of students' learning, the type of participation in school activity and in the social contexts of intervention. It identifies pedagogical innovation in a disruptive perspective, which foresees profound changes in the traditional pedagogical relationship that understands the subject as co-builder of his knowledge.

Журналистің кәсіби этикасы және ұлттық менталитет

The professional ethics of journalists stands out as a pressing issue in contemporary public opinion. This article delves into the impact of the national mentality on journalists’ ethical norms and positions, as endorsed by global journalistic associations. “Journalistic ethics is a pivotal aspect of a journalist’s work. The in-depth reading, comprehensive understanding, and exploration of this represent one of the significant challenges in Kazakh journalism. This complex issue, often overlooked, remains insufficiently acknowledged in both scholarly and professional domains,” the study thoroughly examines within the context of the national mentality. The research provides a scholarly understanding of the continuity of traditions, customs, life positions, and perspectives of the Kazakh people in today’s national journalism. The investigation scrutinizes the extent to which national manners shape journalistic ethics. Many media outlets have exceeded boundaries to boost viewership or readership, exaggerating with high ratings and disseminating misinformation, thereby shaping a contemporary model of journalistic culture. The authors highlight the challenging conditions for information dissemination influenced by such factors. In the final conclusion, the study establishes that scrutinizing ethical principles in the media aids in predicting developmental processes in the state and society, facilitating the formulation of strategies to transform social communication and media culture into a beneficial channel for society.

Inducing a mental context for associative memory formation with real-time fMRI neurofeedback.

Memory, one of the hallmarks of human cognition, can be modified when humans voluntarily modulate neural population activity using neurofeedback. However, it is currently unknown whether neurofeedback can influence the integration of memories, and whether memory is facilitated or impaired after such neural perturbation. In this study, participants memorized objects while we provided them with abstract neurofeedback based on their brain activity patterns in the ventral visual stream. This neurofeedback created an implicit face or house context in the brain while memorizing the objects. The results revealed that participants created associations between each memorized object and its implicit context solely due to the neurofeedback manipulation. Our findings shed light onto how memory formation can be influenced by synthetic memory tags with neurofeedback and advance our understanding of mnemonic processing.

VI International Interdisciplinary Scientific Conference “Metamorphoses of Culture: Donum didacticum. Didactic Code in the Culture of the 18th – 20th Centuries” at NSU

The report presents the analysis of leading topics and individual reports of the VI International Interdisciplinary Scientific Conference “Metamorphoses of Culture”, held as part of the international forum “Heritage” at the Humanitarian Institute of Novosibirsk State University on November 19–20, 2021. The conference was dedicated to the problems of didactic code transformation in the culture of contemporary and the most recent times. The main discussion raised questions about the didactic culture code from the 18th until the 20th century. A special subject of consideration was the conceptual sphere of education and training, and the features of its linguistic and artistic representation. Separate groups of topics and issues related to the problems of education were: court pedagogy and Russian culture of the 18th century till the early 20th century, educational literature in the book culture of Russia in recent times, visual didactics in the space of poly-code text, a book as a source of knowledge – verbal and visual aspects of book culture.In the context of modern pedagogical mentality, real issues related to traditional education methods were reinterpreted, such as travel as a form of education – educational trips in the culture of the nobles, and mnemonic practices in the pedagogy of the 18th – 20th centuries. The revision of the semantic traditions of perception of the basic codes of education (such as “mentor”, “book”, and “road”) formed imperatives for summing up the results of the conference. The prolific achievements of the conference were reached due to the high scientific level and interdisciplinary nature of the reports; culturologists, historians, linguists, literary critics, art critics, and philosophers took part in the scientific discussion.

Never a Dull Moment: Believable Dynamic Character Beat Generation between Game World Events

This work presents a heterogeneous system using ABL, CiF, and a virtual game world to demonstrate how dynamic character beats can be used to preserve believability across game world events. We describe the individual components used in our system and detail how each component contributes to the alignment of physical and mental contexts of NPC agents. Finally, we provide a brief account of the demo experience showcasing our system’s capabilities.

Production as a distinctive contextual cue for retrieving intentionally forgotten information.

The production effect-the memory benefit for information studied aloud as opposed to silently-has been credited to the distinctive processing of the aloud information. Could the production effect be characterized more broadly as a context-based memory effect? At encoding, the distinctive "aloud" information could create a global contextual cue that becomes associated with only the produced information. This cue could then be elicited at retrieval to facilitate memory for the produced information. To test this idea, a mixed-list production effect manipulation was combined with a list-method directed forgetting procedure. According to the contextual change account of list-method directed forgetting, when the first of two lists is to be forgotten, that list is poorly remembered later due to the mental context change between the lists, which causes the context of the second list to better match the test context. Reinstating the relevant contextual cues, therefore, improves memory for the to-be-forgotten list. Our results showed that reading aloud did indeed function as contextual information: Reactivating this production information at retrieval enhanced memory only for aloud items-and not for silent items-from the to-be-forgotten list. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Testing a Model of Disclosure, Perceived Support Quality, and Well-Being in the College Student Mental Illness Context: A Weekly Diary Study

ABSTRACT Prominent disclosure models elucidate decisions to disclose health information, yet explanations for disclosure consequences remain underdeveloped. Drawing on Chaudoir and Fisher’s disclosure process model, this study aims to advance understandings of how disclosure to a parent contributes to well-being for college students with mental illness. We tested a mediational model in which, at the within-person level, perceived support quality explains the association between on-going disclosure of mental illness-related experiences and well-being. Participants were 163 college students who self-identified as having mental illness and who completed six consecutive, weekly surveys. A multilevel analysis showed that increases in disclosures of mental illness-related experiences, relative to participants’ mean level, were associated with enhanced well-being via perceptions of higher quality support, above and beyond between-person differences. This study contributes to the literature by offering an explanation for the effects of disclosure on well-being and underscores the importance of capturing disclosures over time.

A generalized cortical activity pattern at internally generated mental context boundaries during unguided narrative recall.

Current theory and empirical studies suggest that humans segment continuous experiences into events based on the mismatch between predicted and actual sensory inputs; detection of these 'event boundaries' evokes transient neural responses. However, boundaries can also occur at transitions between internal mental states, without relevant external input changes. To what extent do such 'internal boundaries' share neural response properties with externally driven boundaries? We conducted an fMRI experiment where subjects watched a series of short movies and then verbally recalled the movies, unprompted, in the order of their choosing. During recall, transitions between movies thus constituted major boundaries between internal mental contexts, generated purely by subjects' unguided thoughts. Following the offset of each recalled movie, we observed stereotyped spatial activation patterns in the default mode network, especially the posterior medial cortex, consistent across different movie contents and even across the different tasks of movie watching and recall. Surprisingly, the between-movie boundary patterns did not resemble patterns at boundaries between events within a movie. Thus, major transitions between mental contexts elicit neural phenomena shared across internal and external modes and distinct from within-context event boundary detection, potentially reflecting a cognitive state related to the flushing and reconfiguration of situation models.

Mental context reinstatement improves adults’ reports of additional details from two instances of a repeated event

ABSTRACT Remembering specific episodes of a repeated event can be challenging for witnesses. A mental context reinstatement (MCR) instruction increases the number of accurate details that adults report about a single (i.e., non-repeated) event; we examined whether it is similarly beneficial for adults’ reports of a repeated event. Ninety-six participants completed four activity sessions over 2 weeks. One week after the final session, participants were interviewed about two episodes: the time that they could remember best and another time. Two groups of participants received a MCR instruction: MCR1 participants were given a MCR instruction before reporting the time they remembered best, while MCR2 participants were given the same instruction as well as a “refresher” instruction before they reported on another time. Control participants did not receive any MCR instructions. Interview condition did not affect participants’ reports of memory items from the activities. However, MCR1 and MCR2 participants reported more additional details – that is, unverifiable details from before, during and after the activities – than control participants. They were also more likely to spontaneously report the name of the research assistant who conducted the activities. Our results provide initial support for the use of a MCR instruction to support adults’ recall of repeated events.

Speak Louder Than the Ballot: A Cognitive Study to Election Abstention Metaphors

There have been few studies that highlight the use of metaphor in political discourse and election, but none of those studies focus on the election abstention –known in Indonesia as Golput phenomena- and the discussion of the intertwined components in metaphor. This research aims to investigate various metaphor components in the metaphorical description used to describe the abstention during the Indonesian election 2019 within the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Kovecses (2003) highlighted components of metaphor are also used to examine the essential components of conceptual metaphor in the use. The sources of data were from five foreign media reports that discuss the Indonesian issue of election abstention. The result shows there few essential components that can be revealed behind a metaphor such as the importance of mental image, cultural context, and highlighted elements in metaphor that contribute to the metaphorical function and interpretation

ABOUT RUSSIAN MENTALITY IN LANGUAGE, SPEECH AND SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE

This article is devoted to the disclosure of the mental characteristics of the Russian language personality. Particular attention is paid to the synthetic structure of the language, the nonfixed order of words in the sentence and the category of impersonality, which together create a culturally specific mental context of language, speech and scientific discourse.

Fashion in Postmodern Political Communication

The goal of this article is to try to reach theoretical comprehension of the political fashion phenomenon. Conceptualization of fashion as an effect of mass communication allows one to see in it not only a phenomenon of pop culture but also an immanent side, and at the same time the main social, psychological and mental risk of the progress, – the accelerating humanity evolution. The article shows how modern values – novelty priority, truth accessibility, individualism, – and mass communications progress maximize the potential and danger of mass mental enthusiasm in political sphere. The author substantiates the following conclusion: political fashion in the communication mental context of postmodern appears to be the manifestation and factor the increasing crisis of social structure.

Induced forgetting of pictures across shifts in context.

Previous research from our lab has shown that recognizing an object stored in visual long-term memory leads to the forgetting of related objects. Here we ask whether context, an integral aspect to modern models of memory, plays a role in induced forgetting. We manipulated the activated context at test, both externally (e.g., changes in testing room) and internally (e.g., 1 hr and 24 hr later). We found that only interfering with the ability to internally reinstate context after 24 hr eliminated induced forgetting. Thus, we demonstrate that mental context reinstatement plays a role in induced forgetting and specify that models of memory should incorporate internal context reinstatement as an underlying factor of forgetting. We also propose a process model of induced forgetting, discuss limitations of laboratory-based memory tasks, and offer a new term, induced suppression, to collectively describe this robust phenomenon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Oscillatory Correlates of Selective Restudy.

Prior behavioral work has shown that selective restudy of some studied items leaves recall of the other studied items unaffected when lag between study and restudy is short, but improves recall of the other items when lag is prolonged. The beneficial effect has been attributed to context retrieval, assuming that selective restudy reactivates the context at study and thus provides a retrieval cue for the other items (Bäuml, 2019). Here the results of two experiments are reported, in each of which subjects studied a list of items and then, after a short 2-min or a prolonged 10-min lag, restudied some of the list items. Participants' electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded during both the study and restudy phases. In Experiment 2, but not in Experiment 1, subjects engaged in a mental context reinstatement task immediately before the restudy phase started, trying to mentally reinstate the study context. Results of Experiment 1 revealed a theta/alpha power increase from study to restudy after short lag and an alpha/beta power decrease after long lag. Engagement in the mental context reinstatement task in Experiment 2 eliminated the decrease in alpha/beta power. The results are consistent with the view that the observed alpha/beta decrease reflects context retrieval, which became obsolete when there was preceding mental context reinstatement.