Neutral Representations Research Articles

Motivationally Appealing Computer Science e-Learning Games: An Inclusive Design Approach

Research has shown that e-learning games do not have the same level of appeal to girls, as they do to boys; particularly in the crucial 11-14 age group. In the United Kingdom, this is typically when they start to make subject choices that impact their future studies and careers. Given the shortage of females who choose computer science as a career, this study explores how e-learning games can be designed to be motivationally appealing to young learners. It further explores the role of game representations and its appeal to this age group. This empirical study addresses the research question: “Can we develop e-learning games which appeal and motivate girls of age 11-14 to study computer science concepts?” Two e-learning games were developed: one included game representations such as game colour, graphics, character, age appropriateness, storyline, number of players, violence, identified as appealing to young females and the other game included antithetical or neutral representations. The two developed prototypes were used to explore key e-learning game representations as used to teach computer science concepts. A total of 304 participants, comprising of 152 girls and 152 boys from a combination of same sex and mixed secondary schools in Southeast England, engaged with both experimental games. The experiment also elicited information on how learners interact with these games and the resulting game appeal, motivation and learning. The insight gained from the analysis of data captured during the experiments, provide the evidence to demonstrate that inclusive e-learning games which motivate and appeal to girls of age 11-14 can be developed. This can have a positive influence on their willingness to use such games to learn computer science concepts. This implies that the study found positive outcomes related to e-learning game appeal, motivation and the learning of girls of this age group. A follow-up longitudinal study could investigate the impact of significant e-learning game representations that appeal to the target group. This could provide additional evidence on the changes in the appeal of the investigated significant game representations over time, due to the influence of other factors such as socio-economic and socio-cultural differences. This understanding can further enhance inclusive e-learning strategies to improve diversity in computer science education and consequently the career pipeline.

A Discourse Historical Analysis of Identity Construction in Becoming (2018) by Michelle Obama

Research on identity through written narrative has been popular in the linguistics field over the decades. In this paper, a famous memoir written by Michelle Robinson Obama, Becoming (2018), is examined to analyze the construction of identities. This memoir is chosen because of the strong personal narrative and inspiring story which recounts the struggle of the African American woman against discrimination in the United States. This paper focuses on Becoming Us, which is examined through the Discourse-Historical Analysis (DHA) by Ruth Wodak. This approach offers several discursive strategies, some of which are referential/nomination and predication that are applied to analyze the linguistic features which provide positive, negative, and neutral representations of the social actor. All of these representations contribute to construct Michelle Obama’s cultural and racial identities. The novelty of this research lies in a more linguistic approach and historical context as the endeavors to examine the identities.

From making visible to hiding. Visual representations of financial markets as tools of manipulation and active and living agents

This article shows that visual representations of financial markets not only make them visible, i.e. present and reveal certain important financial information such as the size and distribution of demand and supply, the quantity, type and intentions of sellers and buyers, trends and patterns in price movements, or the depth, liquidity and sentiment of the market, but also hide what they are supposed to reveal and make visible. What is important, they do this not only because of the ways of their production; not only because of pitfalls and errors inherent in them; not only because of framing processes they are subjected to, but also because of their interactive nature that allows financial agents to manipulate them. This fact, and above all its possibility, carries with itself important consequences for the role that the visual representations play in the functioning of capital markets. Namely, it causes that these representations, regardless of other factors, themselves become a source of uncertainty in these markets. As such, they are therefore not so much neutral and passive representations of financial exchange as rather tools for manipulation on the one hand and active and living agents on the other.

Climatic Design and Its Others

Drawing on cases from the tropical and subtropical worlds (in Australia and Southeast Asia), we employ southern architectural examples to interrogate normative assumptions around climatic design. As the foundation for a new history of climatic design, this article seeks not only to challenge northern, temperate views of climate in the age of the Anthropocene but also to emphasize tropical zones as a significant paradigm for architects to consider. Our three case studies (i.e., early climographs, the Singapore building code, and the Malay house) delve into some of the Others of climatic design in the southern hemisphere, reassessing the legacy of Asian vernacular architecture. Together, these examples offer new interpretations on race and labor, passive cooling, building codes, and visual models used by architects to represent tropical climates. These case studies reveal that southern climatic models are not simply neutral representations and remain deeply entangled with biased assumptions around cultural identity, place, and historical contexts.

Textual Representation and Intertextuality of Graphene in Swedish Newspapers

Textual representation of graphene in Sweden’s most circulated newspapers is analyzed in 229 articles from 2004 to 2018. What is and is not said about graphene is explored through systematically identifying the lexical and grammatical patterns of sentences using the word “graphene.” Graphene is said to be a super material with certain properties, to be an object of research, commercialization, and application, and to have societal significance. Given frequent classifications of graphene as a nanomaterial in scientific discourse, there is notably limited reference to graphene as “nano” in the newspapers and only marginal reference to risk. This paper discusses the findings regarding this Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene in relation to its intertextuality, i.e., how texts draw upon and recontextualize other texts: the Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene echoes discourses of promise formulated elsewhere in society; it is not very diversified in terms of themes; it is dominated by positive and neutral representations rather than by risk; and it makes limited reference to the nano-discourse, even though, according to most definitions, graphene is a nanomaterial.

The emotion regulation effect of cognitive control is related to depressive state through the mediation of rumination: An ERP study.

Deficits in cognitive control have been found in depression, but how they contribute to depressive symptoms remains unknown. The present study investigated whether the regulatory efficacy of cognitive control on negative emotion varies with depression level and whether the regulatory efficacy affects depressive symptoms via the mediation of rumination. Fifty participants screened by the Zung Self-Rating Depressive Scale (SDS) with high and low depression levels were selected. They were instructed to controlled-process different semantic representations of aversive pictures, and the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) evoked by the pictures was used as the measure of electrocortical response. We found that controlled-processing neutral representations of aversive pictures significantly decreased the amplitude of LPP relative to that under controlled-processing unpleasant ones in an early window in the low depression group and that this regulatory effect was impaired in the high depression group. Furthermore, a mediation analyses indicated that the regulatory efficacy of controlled-processing different semantic representations was associated with SDS score via the mediation of rumination. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying the association between the function of cognitive control in emotion generation and depressive symptoms and indicated a pathway from the regulatory efficacy of cognitive control to depression via rumination.

We Learn Not for School but for Life: Empirical Evidence of the Impact of Tax Literacy on Tax Compliance

Tax revenues are fundamental budgetary resources for the majority of governments around the world. Consequently, the goal of identifying efficient strategies that facilitate an increase in tax compliance should be on the agenda of all tax authorities. By surveying 358 Romanian taxpayers, our study analyzes how tax literacy influences tax compliance, thus contributing to the existing literature, which reports few results on this topic. Using moderation analysis, we find that tax literacy is one of the key elements shaping tax compliance. Respondents who reported more neutral social representations of taxation concepts turned out to be more tax literate and more willing to comply voluntarily. The level of tax literacy was estimated using a tax literacy index created for this purpose. Our study provides policy makers with a starting point for understanding how taxpayers comprehend taxation concepts and how they relate to the tax system. Equipped with such information, those charged with designing tax policy could help raise literacy among taxpayers, making the role of tax collection more salient and ultimately improving tax compliance.

Functional interplay of top-down attention with affective codes during visual short-term memory maintenance

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) allows individuals to briefly maintain information over time for guiding behaviours. Because the contents of VSTM can be neutral or emotional, top-down influence in VSTM may vary with the affective codes of maintained representations. Here we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the functional interplay of top-down attention with affective codes in VSTM using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants were instructed to remember both threatening and neutral objects in a cued VSTM task. Retrospective cues (retro-cues) were presented to direct attention to the hemifield of a threatening object (i.e., cue-to-threat) or a neutral object (i.e., cue-to-neutral) during VSTM maintenance. We showed stronger activity in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex and amygdala for attending threatening relative to neutral representations. Using multivoxel pattern analysis, we found better classification performance for cue-to-threat versus cue-to-neutral objects in early visual areas and in the amygdala. Importantly, retro-cues modulated the strength of functional connectivity between the frontoparietal and early visual areas. Activity in the frontoparietal areas became strongly correlated with the activity in V3a–V4 coding the threatening representations instructed to be relevant for the task. Together, these findings provide the first demonstration of top-down modulation of activation patterns in early visual areas and functional connectivity between the frontoparietal network and early visual areas for regulating threatening representations during VSTM maintenance.

Only "efficient" emotional stimuli affect the content of working memory during free-recollection from natural scenes.

Emotional events are thought to have privileged access to attention and memory, consuming resources needed to encode competing emotionally neutral stimuli. However, it is not clear whether this detrimental effect is automatic or depends on the successful maintenance of the specific emotional object within working memory. Here, participants viewed everyday scenes including an emotional object among other neutral objects followed by a free-recollection task. Results showed that emotional objects-irrespective of their perceptual saliency-were recollected more often than neutral objects. The probability of being recollected increased as a function of the arousal of the emotional objects, specifically for negative objects. Successful recollection of emotional objects (positive or negative) from a scene reduced the overall number of recollected neutral objects from the same scene. This indicates that only emotional stimuli that are efficient in grabbing (and then consuming) available attentional resources play a crucial role during the encoding of competing information, with a subsequent bias in the recollection of neutral representations.

Top-down modulation of alpha power and pattern similarity for threatening representations in visual short-term memory

Recent studies have shown that top-down attention biases task-relevant representations in visual short-term memory (VSTM). Accumulating evidence has also revealed the modulatory effects of emotional arousal on attentional processing. However, it remains unclear how top-down attention interacts with emotional memoranda in VSTM. In this study, we investigated the mechanisms of alpha oscillations and their spatiotemporal characteristics that underlie top-down attention to threatening representations during VSTM maintenance with electroencephalography. Participants were instructed to remember a threatening object and a neutral object in a cued variant delayed response task. Retrospective cues (retro-cues) were presented to direct attention to the hemifield of a threatening object (i.e., cue-to-threat trials) or a neutral object (i.e., cue-to-neutral trials) during a retention interval prior to the probe test. We found a significant retro-cue-related alpha lateralisation over posterior regions during VSTM maintenance. The novel finding was that the magnitude of alpha lateralisation was greater for cue-to-threat objects compared to cue-to-neutral ones. These results indicated that directing attention towards threatening representations compared to neutral representations could result in greater regulation of alpha activity contralateral to the cued hemifield. Importantly, we estimated the spatiotemporal pattern similarity in alpha activity and found significantly higher similarity indexes for the posterior regions relative to the anterior regions and for the cue-to-threat objects relative to cue-to-neutral objects over the posterior regions. Together, our findings provided the oscillatory evidence of greater top-down modulations of alpha lateralisation and spatiotemporal pattern similarity for attending to threatening representations in VSTM.

The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq by Philip Wood (review)

Reviewed by: The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq by Philip Wood Kyle Smith Philip Wood The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 Pp. xiv + 305. $125.00. Discovered in the early twentieth century, the Arabic Chronicle of Seert is an extensive narrative history of Christianity in Iraq. Composed in the tenth century as a universal history, the Chronicle has not survived intact. What remains is a record of a four-hundred-year period from 250 to 650 c.e., with a large gap in the coverage of the mid-fifth century. Despite what has been lost, the surviving material fills four fascicles of the Patrologia Orientalis. Perhaps because of its length, its chronological breadth, and the daunting array of late antique sources upon which it relies, no one has attempted a holistic study of the Chronicle. This is where Philip Wood’s ambitious new book comes in. For Wood, the Chronicle is primarily useful as a window through which we can see how the Church of the East imagined, and re-imagined, its late antique past. Because the Chronicle’s compiler “adopted a very conservative attitude to editing, preserving contradictory accounts of the same events alongside one another,” Wood argues that we can reverse engineer how the Chronicle was produced (6). The root of the Chronicle is a fifth-century “patriarchal history” onto which a number of later sources were grafted. These later sources include everything from martyrdom narratives and monastic biographies to Roman ecclesiastical histories, Syriac scholastic literature, and Sasanian royal lineages, all of which are subordinated “to a ‘universal’ history, structured around the catholicosate” (3–4). The first two chapters of Wood’s study address the beginnings of the Chronicle’s episcopal history by considering how martyrdom narratives about fourth- and fifth-century Persian Christians were “reworked.” The Catholicoi, who wanted to establish cordial relations with the shah and exert their authority over the Church of the East, put forward “more neutral representations of the martyrs as ideal priests and passive victims,” not firebrands and rebels (65). By the sixth century, the catholicosate was remembering “a sanitized version of its own history … which obscured real divisions over episcopal authority and the relationship with the state” (51). The two very different martyrdom narratives of Simeon bar Ṣabbaʿe (the fourth-century bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon whom Wood considers in Chapter Two) do suggest that a clean-up job occurred, but Wood’s “sanitation” argument is less compelling as an account of fifth-century history. As Geoffrey Herman has recently shown, stories about Christian zealots who vandalized Persian fire temples in the early 420s c.e. may have arisen in the eastern Roman Empire. And, as Wood himself acknowledges (117, 235), it is possible that the acts of the Synod of Dādišoʿ in 424 c.e. were so significantly interpolated in later centuries that they actually tell us relatively little about fifth-century divisions over episcopal authority. These issues do not detract from Wood’s major thesis, which focuses on how [End Page 322] the Chronicle narrates the period from 483 to 650 c.e. According to Wood, the “centralizing narrative” of the Chronicle truly begins with the renewal of the catholicosate under Acacius. In the synod that he convened in 486 c.e., Acacius “reacted strongly against the challenges of Barsauma of Nisibis, who had attempted to assert the dependence of the catholicosate upon his bishops” (93). In Chapter Three, Wood sets out a number of “medieval redactions of the fifth- and sixth-century patriarchal chronicles” and then reconstructs the earlier compositions in order to assess “their significance for the cultural and political self-presentation of the catholicosate of Acacius through its reorganization of the past” (67). Chapter Four pits the issue of clerical reform against the growing influence of powerful Christian scholastics from Nisibis. Chapters Five and Six explain how, in addition to the rise of the School of Nisibis and the spread of Roman ecclesiastical history in Syriac, the “rapid expansion of monasticism in Iraq from the 550s” and “the increasing prominence of a Christian elite, many of whom were from...

A filter-mediated communication model for design collaboration in building construction.

Multidisciplinary collaboration is an important aspect of modern engineering activities, arising from the growing complexity of artifacts whose design and construction require knowledge and skills that exceed the capacities of any one professional. However, current collaboration in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries often fails due to lack of shared understanding between different participants and limitations of their supporting tools. To achieve a high level of shared understanding, this study proposes a filter-mediated communication model. In the proposed model, participants retain their own data in the form most appropriate for their needs with domain-specific filters that transform the neutral representations into semantically rich ones, as needed by the participants. Conversely, the filters can translate semantically rich, domain-specific data into a neutral representation that can be accessed by other domain-specific filters. To validate the feasibility of the proposed model, we computationally implement the filter mechanism and apply it to a hypothetical test case. The result acknowledges that the filter mechanism can let the participants know ahead of time what will be the implications of their proposed actions, as seen from other participants' points of view.

The effects of optimism and pessimism on updating emotional information in working memory

In the present study we elucidate the emotional and executive control interactions that might underlie optimism and pessimism. Participants completed a self-report measure of optimism/pessimism and performed an emotion faces categorisation task and an emotion n-back task in which they indicated whether each of a series of faces had the same or a different emotional expression (happy, sad, neutral) as the face presented two trials before. Trials were structured to measure latency to update emotional content in working memory (WM). More pessimistic individuals formed connections among positive stimuli, and broke connections among positive and sad stimuli, in WM more slowly than did less pessimistic individuals; levels of optimism/pessimism did not affect the rate with which individuals formed and broke connections among neutral representations in WM. It appears, therefore, that levels of pessimism are related to specific affective cognitive mechanisms in WM that may be involved in emotion regulation.

Regimenting languages on Korean television: subtitles and institutional authority

This article presents an analysis of two different practices of subtitling on Korean television. It claims that these practices constitute different strategies of entextualization that produce authoritative regimentations of languages and discourses through manipulation of the intertextual distance between the original text and its representation. In the first type, impact captioning, or intralanguage subtitles on entertainment shows, different styles of subtitles distinguish the authoritative voice of the institution from the voices of ordinary speakers, allowing the media institution to simultaneously exploit speakers' problematic discourse for humorous purposes and to maintain an official image of neutrality and morality. In the second type, translation subtitling, which translates speech in languages that are assumed to be incomprehensible to viewers, subtitles enable the media institution to position its viewers with respect to linguistic competence, a process that is mediated by the construction of subtitles as neutral representations of spoken discourse. Therefore, in both cases, entextualization of discourse through subtitles must be seen as a strategy for the projection of institutional authority, reflecting metadiscursive interactional work done by the producers of media texts as they engage in acts of regimentation.

Contrasting Aesthetic Evaluations of “Graffiti” Images as a Function of Incongruity Intolerance Levels

This investigation develops a line of research aimed at examining the influence of incongruity intolerance level on subjects' aesthetic evaluations of relatively harmonious or very conflictual images. Sixty young adults were selected from a larger population and divided into two extreme subgroups: thirty very incongruity intolerant persons and thirty very incongruity tolerant ones. Both genders were equally represented in each category. Selection was based on a specific quick visual procedure, the Building Inclination Test (BIT: Bonaiuto, Giannini, & Bonaiuto, 1987, 1989; Bonaiuto, Biasi, Giannini, & Bartoli, 1996), providing a numerical index of incongruity intolerance, which has also been proved to be positively related to behavioral rigidity and negatively to ambiguity tolerance. Twelve full-color A4 reproductions of American “graffiti” paintings (made from 1981 to 1990 by artists such as Basquiat, Brown, Cutrone, Haring, Scharf, or others) were shown one at a time on a lectern and individually submitted to each subject for evaluating aesthetic and emotional properties using eleven-point scales. Systematic rotation of scales and pictures and double-blind experimental conditions were used. The images were selected corresponding to three categories: a) figurative playful and relaxing representations, b) semiabstract, emotionally quite neutral representations, and c) figurative disquieting, very conflictual representations. An overall progressive decrease of attributed beauty was found moving from the first to the third group of images. This effect was more intense for the very incongruity intolerant observers, who highly preferred images of the first category and deeply disliked those of the third category. On the other hand, the very incongruity tolerant participants recorded on average a less positive aesthetical appreciation score with the first category and a less negative one for the third category (there was a significant interaction between image category and observer's personality, p < 0.002). The aesthetic rejection of the most disquieting and conflictual images especially by the very incongruity intolerant persons is explained by the authors as an effect of the overloading of psychic conflict in this type of persons.