Symbolic Categories Research Articles

Representation of visual symbols in the visual word processing network

BackgroundPrevious studies have shown that word processing involves a predominantly left-sided occipitotemporal network. Words are a form of symbolic representation, in that they are arbitrary perceptual stimuli that represent other objects, actions or concepts. Lesions of parts of the visual word processing network can cause alexia, which can be associated with difficulty processing other types of symbols such as musical notation or road signs. ObjectiveWe investigated whether components of the visual word processing network were also activated by other types of symbols. MethodIn 16 music-literate subjects, we defined the visual word network using fMRI and examined responses to four symbolic categories: visual words, musical notation, instructive symbols (e.g. traffic signs), and flags and logos. For each category we compared responses not only to scrambled stimuli, but also to similar stimuli that lacked symbolic meaning. ResultsThe left visual word form area and a homologous right fusiform region responded similarly to all four categories, but equally to both symbolic and non-symbolic equivalents. Greater response to symbolic than non-symbolic stimuli occurred only in the left inferior frontal and middle temporal gyri, but only for words, and in the case of the left inferior frontal gyri, also for musical notation. A whole-brain analysis comparing symbolic versus non-symbolic stimuli revealed a distributed network of inferior temporooccipital and parietal regions that differed for different symbols. ConclusionThe fusiform gyri are involved in processing the form of many symbolic stimuli, but not specifically for stimuli with symbolic content. Selectivity for stimuli with symbolic content only emerges in the visual word network at the level of the middle temporal and inferior frontal gyri, but is specific for words and musical notation.

Category theory of symbolic dynamics

We study the central objects of symbolic dynamics, that is, subshifts and block maps, from the perspective of basic category theory, and present several natural categories with subshifts as objects and block maps as morphisms. Our main goals are to find universal objects in these symbolic categories, to classify their block maps based on their category theoretic properties, to prove category theoretic characterizations for notions arising from symbolic dynamics, and to establish as many natural properties (finite completeness, regularity etc.) as possible. Existing definitions in category theory suggest interesting new problems in symbolic dynamics. Our main technical contributions are the solution to the dual problem of the Extension Lemma and results on certain types of conserved quantities, suggested by the concept of a coequalizer.

Conjuring difference, concealing inequality: a brief tour of Racecraft

The “social construction of race” is an oft-invoked academic truism. As a heuristic, the constructivist principle is at times assumed rather than demonstrated, exclaimed rather than put to work in the difficult task of showing how, by whom, under what conditions, and to what ends symbolic categories are made real in the lives of individuals and in the workings of institutions alike. The expression, nevertheless, offers a potent challenge to a visual economy that purports everyone “has” a race that can be read off of or in to the body. With their new book, Karen Fields and Barbara Fields (hereafter FF) take the reader back to first principles, revealing the many ways racial vision and division haunt social life in the United States. They insist that scholars, and survey researchers in particular, relinquish the idea of “race relations” that can be discerned by studying individuals’ attitudes about others. The question of how others are continuously made and re-made via custom, law, and scholarly suppositions is the focus of Racecraft. In this way, the text contributes to a vigorous re-evaluation of the role of sociology in inadvertently deepening static conceptions of groupness through our foundational concepts and methods. “Racecraft,” the authors argue, is first and foremost an ongoing set of social practices that continuously misconstrue racism for race. The former is a function of power and inequality whereas the latter is purportedly grounded in biology and culture. By focusing on the inherent qualities of groups, whether residing in genes or values, the analyst loses sight of the larger context in which those differences are conjured in the first place. Conjured, because in the same way that witches need not exist for people to feel the effects of witchcraft, so too with race—genetic differences between racial groups need not actually exist for such claims to exercise political and social effects. Racecraft is the process by which scholarship and public discourse focuses on genes, IQ, or criminal propensity as explanations for patterns of hypertension, high school Theor Soc (2014) 43:683–688 DOI 10.1007/s11186-014-9238-z

Perceived Brand Personality of Symbolic Brands

Brand personality can be defined as a set of human characteristics associated with a brand (Aaker, 1997).This study reports on the perceived brand personality of symbolic brands as seen by Generation Y students from one higher education institution campus located in South Africa. The respondents were asked to write down the first brand that came to mind for eight symbolic product categories. The top two brands in each category were used in a self-administered questionnaire. A second group of respondents were then asked to write down personality traits they associate with each of the identified brands. These findings, present a unique viewpoint regarding a number of brands and how the respondents perceive their brand personalities.

‘It’s Quite Stylish’: Representations of American English and American Culture in English-Training Milieus in Delhi, India

English-training institutes seem to be ubiquitous in India, and they often index the United States through reference to ‘American accent’ training, American teachers, or simply American flags on their storefront signs. Against the broader backdrop of globalization, and through an examination of institute signs and advertisements and interviews with institute students and teachers, I show how ‘America’ is represented, produced, and consumed as a symbolic and cultural category within the cultural domain of English-training institutes.

Symbolic power, politics, and intellectuals: the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power - the power to dominate - is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more subtle and influential ways that cultural resources and symbolic categories prevail in power arrangements and practices had gained broad recognition. In Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals, David L. Swartz delves deeply into Bourdieu's work to show how central - but often overlooked - power and politics are to an understanding of sociology. Arguing that power and politics also stand at the core of Bourdieu's sociology, Swartz illuminates Bourdieu's political project for the social sciences, as well as Bourdieu's own political activism, explaining how sociology is not just science but also a crucial form of political engagement.

Symbolic Lizards: Forms of Special Purpose Classification of Animals among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia

ABSTRACTThe Nage people of Flores island, eastern Indonesia, recognize an unnamed (or “covert”) life-form category comprising several named kinds of lizards as a distinct component of their folk zoological taxonomy, a general purpose classification of animals based primarily on universally observable morphological and behavioral features. Exploring symbolic values of lizards evidenced in Nage thought and practice, this essay considers how far lizards might also compose a unitary symbolic class and whether symbolic similarity and contrast may inform Nage taxonomy. The answer is in both cases negative. Typically, symbolic classes cross-cut the major divisions of a folk taxonomy of animals, thereby associating, on symbolic grounds (such as common association with spiritual beings), animals belonging to diverse life-forms such as snakes, birds, and fish. With reference to this and other findings, exploration of Nage lizard classification serves to introduce a discussion of general differences between folk taxonomy and symbolic classification of animals as well as circumstances in which folk taxonomic and symbolic categories are likely to coincide. Attention is also given to utilitarian categories as another form of special purpose, non-taxonomic classification, and with reference to specific practical uses Nage make of lizards, it is shown how the various members of the Nage folk taxon “lizard” similarly do not compose a single class. Contradicting a time-honored view most closely associated with Mary Douglas, the essay thus provides a comprehensive, critical demonstration of how animal classification in a given society need not compose a conceptual unity.

Inferences of Personality Traits from Bedroom Objects: An Approach from the SCM

This research aims to investigate whether individuals use categories of objects to classify cues inside a bedroom and to find relations between those clusters and occupants’ personality traits. Three studies were conducted. A list of the most significant belongings inside residents’ bedrooms was obtained from the pilot study. The second study (N = 81) indicated the existence of two categories of objects: Functional and Symbolic. The third study (N = 277) showed that the dimensions of Competence and Warmth, proposed by the Stereotype Content Model, were associated to the functional and symbolic categories of the objects respectively.

The enigma of the male sex symbol

When Daniel Craig emerged from the sea as the new James Bond in Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006), his appearance (and his physique) created a media furore. For the first time since the days of Sean Connery, James Bond was once again a sex symbol. Starting with the many examples offered by the James Bond franchise, this essay identifies the sex symbol as a ubiquitous but essentially ill-defined category of celebrity status. Challenging a ‘common-sense’ understanding of the sex symbol, this essay emphasises the importance of the sex symbol as a way into understanding the complexity and mutability of attitudes towards sex and sexuality. The intention of this article is to bring the category of sex symbol into critical view, to make some provisional suggestions as to the ways in which this phenomenon might be interrogated and to consider what the specific issues might be in relation to an understanding of the male sex symbol in particular.

Entering the Crack Between the Worlds: Symbolism in Western Shamanism

This paper will explore shared symbols in Western shamanism, their meanings and signification. Shamanism is a contested and multivalent term, so first there will be a theoretical delimitation of what is meant by Western shamanism. The definition presented is a religious practice found in contemporary Western society. Symbolism will then be analysed through three main categories. The first category of symbols will be the use of darkness/light metaphors, and their meaning and importance in Western shamanism. Then the symbol of soul loss and retrieval will be analysed, and the image of the journeys and what this is supposed to achieve. Finally, the practice of symbolic appropriation will be tackled by analysing the use (and abuse) of symbols from other cultures. What this will demonstrate on the one hand is the Western origin of the shared symbols used in Western shamanism and on the other hand how this origin is concealed with non-Western symbols, used as a strategy of legitimation.

Expression of Symbols and Their Message of Peace and Conflict in Identity Drawing Map (IDM):Arab and Jewish Students

In 2008, we conducted a large scale study following our methodology developed for the analysis of drawings to assess identity (Hertz-Lazarowitz, Farah, & Yosef-Meitav, 2012). We gathered interviews and asked for drawing Identity Drawing Map from 184 students aged from 20-30 years. The symbols in the drawings were grouped in 5 categories: religious, national, emotional, secular-cultural and nature and person figure symbols. The most frequent symbols were related to the nature and person figure category, and the least frequent were symbols from the secular-cultural category. The symbol categories with most indicative of identity conflicts were religious and national. The Arabs had more conflicted and complex IDM messages than Jews and the evaluation of their emotions were less positive and less optimistic than the Jews. The IDM methodology revealed the complex and multi-layered expression of identity construction. These findings can provide better understanding into the mechanism of identity construction in a society and the University context which has been conflict ridden for many decades.

Infecção hospitalar na visão de enfermeiros da Santa Casa de Caridade de Bagé - RS

Background and Objective: Hospital Infection (HI) is that acquired after patient admission and that manifests during hospitalization or after discharge, when it can be related to the hospital admission or procedures. The objective was to verify the point of view of the nurses of Santa Casa de Caridade de Bagé regarding hospital infections. Methods: This was an exploratory study carried out with 32 nurses from Santa Casa de Caridade de Bagé. Data were collected using the in-depth interview technique from July to August 2010, where the subjects answered questions about the association between infection control and nursing care, in which answers were submitted to the theme content analysis technique. Results: They were divided into three symbolic categories: definition of HI, nurses’ actions regarding HI and the nurses’ perception on HI managers. Conclusion: The evaluation showed that nurses have a good theoretical background on the subject, as they answered the questions clearly and appropriately. Key words: Hospital Infection, Nursing, Social Representations.

Coloring the Poetic Voice in the Dominican Republic: Aída Cartagena's Yania Tierra

The assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961 and the civil war of 1965 sparked a revision of the symbolic categories of their cultural heritage among Dominican writers throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Themes that once were silenced or disregarded, such as the subordination of women and the contribution of non-European elements to Dominican culture, were now portrayed in literary works. This essay explores how, in its attention to the overlooked, Aída Cartagena's epic poem Yania Tierra opens up the possibility of rethinking the study of gender and race in Latin American literature. I argue that this hybrid text, which combines pictures, fragments of other poems, street signs, advertising slogans, prose sections, as well as verses of varying meters and typographies, assumes a paradoxical stance: it both works to counter the conventional portrayal of racial and gender differences, and recycles paradigms formulated by prior Dominican authors, such as Manuel de Jesús Galvún and Salomé Ureña de Henríquez.

From engineering diagrams to engineering models: Visual recognition and applications

We present a computational recognition approach to convert network-like, image-based engineering diagrams into engineering models with which computations of interests, such as CAD modeling, simulation, information retrieval and semantic-aware editing, are enabled. The proposed approach is designed to work on diagrams produced using computer-aided drawing tools or hand sketches, and does not rely on temporal information for recognition. Our approach leverages a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as a trainable engineering symbol recognizer. The CNN is capable of learning the visual features of the defined symbol categories from a few user-supplied prototypical diagrams and a set of synthetically generated training samples. When deployed, the trained CNN is applied either to the entire input diagram using a multi-scale sliding window or, where applicable, to each isolated pixel cluster obtained through Connected Component Analysis (CCA). Then the connectivity between the detected symbols are analyzed to obtain an attributed graph representing the engineering model conveyed by the diagram. We evaluate the performance of the approach with benchmark datasets and demonstrate its utility in different application scenarios, including the construction and simulation of control system or mechanical vibratory system models from hand-sketched or camera-captured images, content-based image retrieval for resonant circuits and sematic-aware image editing for floor plans.

Unfinished Synthesis: Georg Simmel’s Adventure, Two Chinese Jamaican Migration Narratives, and the Negotiation of Modern Identity

Dans cet article, nous explorerons la façon dont le concept simmelien de «l’aventure» peut servir de catégorie symbolique offrant un cadre pour mieux comprendre les souvenirs d’enfance de l’experience de migration de la part de deux Sino-jamaïcains ainsi que leur tentative de négocier et de synthétiser les tensions causées par cette expérience dans une expression globale d’identité. L’aventure simmelienne tient compte du fait que le processus même de synthétiser les événements vécus attire l’attention sur les déconnexions et les perturbations —définies par Simmel comme des «dualités»—, qu’il considère caractéristiques des identités modernes. Les récits des Sino-jamaïcains étudies ici mettent en évidence les dualités de ces aventures, telles qu’elles ont été conçues par Simmel et, à ce titre, reconfirment la vision des Caraïbes comme un espace de la modernité. De même, elles nous permettent de reconnaitre les expériences et les contributions d’un groupe minoritaire de cette région comme étant importantes pour notre compréhension des identités diasporiques modernes en général et aux Caraïbes en particulier.

Mapping direct human impact on the topography of Hungary

Summary. Similarly to other European countries, human impacts of various types are discernible in all regions of Hungary. Restricting the infl uence of human activities to direct transformation of topographic conditions, primary and secondary landforms created, the main categories of symbols included in the legend of an overview map refer to water management (fl ood-control dykes, dams and canals); to housing development, industry and transportation (landfi lls, sealed, levelled and ter-raced surfaces; motorway/railway embankments and cuts), to agriculture (terraces, hollow roads) as well as to other human activities with geomorphic impact (military and sports facilities). Th e map symbols are designed to provide some indication of the relative extent of human action and the size of anthropogenic landforms. Usually two (large or small scale impact) or three (large, medium or small scale) relative size categories are applied. Th e data base for the map is processed at 1:500,000 scale, allowing some reduction in scale for fi nal publication in an international ”Atlas of Human mpact I on Topography” under preparation by members of the IAG Working Group ”Human Impact on the Landscape”, created in 2005.Zusammenfassung.

THE EFFECTS OF PARENT‐IMPLEMENTED PECS TRAINING ON IMPROVISATION OF MANDS BY CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

The present study examined the extent to which mothers were able to train their children, 2 boys with autism, to exchange novel pictures to request items using the picture exchange communication system (PECS). Generalization probes assessing each child's ability to mand for untrained items were conducted throughout conditions. Using a multiple baseline design, results demonstrated that both children improvised by using alternative symbols when the corresponding symbol was unavailable across all symbol categories (colors, shapes, and functions) and that parents can teach their children to use novel pictorial response forms.

Exclusion Learning and Emergent Symbolic Category Formation in Individuals With Severe Language Impairments and Intellectual Disabilities

We evaluated formation of simple symbolic categories from initial learning of specific dictated word-picture relations through emergence of untaught or derived relations. Participants were 10 individuals with severe intellectual and language limitations. Three experimental categories were constructed, each containing 1 spoken word (Set A), 1 photograph (Set B), and 1 visual-graphic "lexigram" (Set C). Exclusion-based learning procedures were used to teach first the 3 auditory-visual relations (A-B relations) and then the 3 visual-visual relations (B-C relations) for each category. Seven participants acquired these initial relations. The untaught relations C-B and A-C were then assessed to evaluate the emergence of symbolic categories. Participants demonstrated virtually error-free performances on C-B and A-C derived relations. The study helps to define operationally a highly useful procedural path for systematic instruction in symbolic functioning for persons with intellectual and language disabilities associated with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Os casamentos árabes: a recriação de tradições entre imigrantes palestinos no Sul do Brasil

O artigo reúne os resultados produzidos em dois campos de pesquisa – a cidade de Chuí e grande Porto Alegre, RS –, explorados por meio do método etnográfico. O objetivo é evidenciar o empenho dos imigrantes em recriar tradições árabes e sublinhar práticas sociais comuns, extraindo do terreno da vida ordinária elementos que são elevados à categoria de signo emblemático da própria coletividade. Desde a publicação da coletânea A Invenção das Tradições de Ranger & Hobsbawn em 1983, discorrer sobre “tradições” não é um exercício de mera descrição. Retomamos o debate sobre a invenção e recriação das tradições a partir da análise dos rituais de casamento e da centralidade dessas festas de casamento na fabricação de uma coesão social.

The Social Representation of Entrepreneurs in the French Press

The purpose of this article is to question the foundations and structure of entrepreneurs' social representation in the French press. Social representations are the result of a perceptive and cognitive construction of reality, which transforms social objects (people, contexts, situations) into symbolic categories (values, beliefs, ideologies), therefore providing a collective significant system for the regulation of cognitions and actions (Ljunggren and Alsos, 2001).Within the consensual reality through which the social world is created and experienced, the press can be emphasized as an entrepreneurial `Greek chorus' (Kets deVries, 2000) playing a key role in the diffusion and transformation of entrepreneurial culture at the local and national levels.We conducted a discourse analysis of 962 articles, from 2001 to 2005, in order to study the press's potential impact on entrepreneurial desirability and feasibility beliefs.We identified three main categories of discourses — the legitimacy discourse, the normativity discourse, and the accessibility discourse, which may impact readers' desirability and feasibility beliefs. This is the first attempt to assess the role of the public discourse in fuelling entrepreneurial intentions in the French context.