Third-person Point Of View Research Articles

Close to You: Embodied Simulation for Peripersonal Space in Primary Somatosensory Cortex

BackgroundAn increasing body of evidence has demonstrated that in contrast to the classic understanding the primary somatosensory cortex (SI) reflects merely seen touch (in the absence of any real touch on the own body). Based on these results it has been discussed that SI may play a role in understanding touch seen on other bodies. In order to further examine this understanding of observed touch, the current study aimed to test if mirror-like responses in SI are affected by the perspective of the seen touch. Thus, we presented touch on a hand and close to the hand either in first-person-perspective or in third-person-perspective.Principal FindingsResults of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed stronger vicarious brain responses in SI/BA2 for touch seen in first-person-perspective. Surprisingly, the third-person viewpoint revealed activation in SI both when subjects viewed a hand being stimulated as well as when the space close to the hand was being touched.Conclusions/SignificanceBased on these results we conclude that vicarious somatosensory responses in SI/BA2 are affected by the viewpoint of the seen hand. Furthermore, we argue that mirror-like responses in SI do not only reflect seen touch, but also the peripersonal space surrounding this body (in third-person-perspective). We discuss these findings with recent studies on mirror responses for action observation in peripersonal space.

Effect of the conceptual and physical third person point of view on egocentric and exocentric spatial judgments

Effect of the conceptual and physical third person point of view on egocentric and exocentric spatial judgments

Islam and the West

This short essay analyzes the deception and self-deception in talk of ‘the clash of civilizations’ and proceeds to diagnose what is wrong in the standard understanding of Islam in the Western media today by looking to the abiding history of colonial relations with Islam down to this day and also looking to the relation between ideals of democracy and the formation of religious identities. The essay closes with some remarks about the nature of identity and the importance to one's own agency of the distinction between the first and the third person point of view in Muslim self-understanding.

The Ethics of Alien Attitudes

1. IntroductionPeople do not always really believe what they take themselves to believe. A person may sincerely say that a certain racist belief is definitively false, but still hold such a belief. When asked what he believes about something, it is likely that he simply expresses his opinion about the issue in question, and this reveals what he takes himself to believe, but not necessarily what he really believes. In some cases, however, a person may adopt a kind of a third-person point of view. Instead of expressing his opinion, he may report the attitude he has in light of convincing evidence concerning his behavior and other attitudes. It follows that sometimes a person may report having an attitude which conflicts with his better judgment (his opinion). Many people have completely unjustified racially biased beliefs and, judging from my behavior must admit that have them myself. In these cases the person's (evidential) beliefs are not apparent to the person in the normal way, and are not judgment-sensitive (or reason-responsive) in a way that they are supposed to be.1 Beliefs of this kind can be called attitudes, or more narrowly, beliefs. They are attitudes or beliefs that fail to be sensitive to the person's regular processes of introspection and evaluation and are known by him merely through behavioral and psychological evidence that he has noticed about himself, or learned about himself from others.2 When a person is aware of his beliefs in this way, he is not committed to their truth or overall acceptability; he has not endorsed them as true.3 To have an attitude of this sort is to realize that one has conflicting attitudes, with some (the alien ones) being very oddly related to oneself. Most or all people have unnoticed beliefs mat conflict with their sincere opinions, but the unnoticed beliefs of this sort are not alien in the relevant sense, as they do not appear as to those who have them.In daily life people are typically interested in others' opinions. When people say I love you, for example, or make contracts, they express their opinions, they do not merely report their beliefs by referring to the best evidence available, and this is also what they are expected to do. There are some exceptions to this. Employers, for instance, may make use of psychological tests in order to find out jobseekers' evidential beliefs (and character traits) instead of their stated opinions, however sincere they may be. However, in general, opinions suffice in everyday life - maybe because people assume (wrongly) that others' explicit opinions accurately reflect their evidential beliefs, or because they are not interested in others' evidential beliefs in the first place. It is often much more important to know how people justify their choices than to learn what really influenced them when they made those choices and what beliefs should be attributed to them.4 If we wish to find out whether a person speaks sincerely, say, in a court of law, we need to determine whether what he says is what he takes himself to believe, not whether what he says is what he really believes, in the evidential sense of believing.5 Of course, it may be important to know what a person's evidential beliefs are, because they tend to influence his behavior. But evidential beliefs need not influence behavior. When a person who sincerely says that racism is wrong hears from a reliable source that in fact he has racially biased beliefs and accepts the disappointing news, he can try to make sure that those biased beliefs do not affect his behavior. To a certain degree, it depends on the person how he deals with his attitudes.In what follows, we aim to analyze some ethical dilemmas that people may face when they deal with their attitudes, in particular, their beliefs. We will ask what might follow if attitudes are treated as a part of reality, and what kinds of ethical problems can arise when a person wishes to identify with his or her attitudes. …

Memory: A Philosophical Study * By SVEN BERNECKER

Sven Bernecker's contribution to the ongoing revival in the philosophy of memory offers a consistent vision and analysis of propositional remembering, and covers a range of topics in analytic metaphysics and epistemology. Bernecker defends a methodological externalism, by which memory ‘must be analyzed from a third-person point of view’ (34): so even though conceptual analysis remains the primary method, the ‘linguistic intuitions’ that guide it ‘are not a priori but empirical working hypotheses’ (31). Given the central role of such intuitions in Bernecker's treatment of many briefly described thought experiments throughout the book, it is strange that he does not defend their use more explicitly in this early section on method, instead leaving it to a later footnote (147, n. 11) to say that ‘trying to defend the use of intuitions in the philosophy of memory would … take us too far afield’. Bernecker's subtitle signals a restricted target audience: this is a book for those analytic philosophers who will enjoy long exegeses on Twin Earth, slow switching or quasi-memory. Psychological results on memory are cited, but only piecemeal, and interactive dialogue with scientific theory is not Bernecker's aim.

Effects of the model’s handedness and observer’s viewpoint on observational learning

Observation promotes motor skill learning. However, little is known about the type of model and conditions of observation that can optimize learning. In this study, we investigated the effects of the model's handedness and the observer's viewpoint on the learning of a complex spatiotemporal task. Four groups of right-handed participants observed, from either a first- or third-person viewpoint, right- or left-handed models performing the task. Observation resulted in significant learning. More importantly, observation of same-handed models resulted in improved learning as compared with observation of opposite-handed models, regardless of the observer's viewpoint. This suggests that the action observation network (AON) is more sensitive to the model's handedness than to the observer's viewpoint. Our results are consistent with recent studies that suggest that the AON is linked to or involves sensorimotor regions of the brain that simulate motor programming as if the observed movement was performed with one's own dominant hand.

Self-recognition of avatar motion: how do I know it's me?

When motion is isolated from form cues and viewed from third-person perspectives, individuals are able to recognize their own whole body movements better than those of friends. Because we rarely see our own bodies in motion from third-person viewpoints, this self-recognition advantage may indicate a contribution to perception from the motor system. Our first experiment provides evidence that recognition of self-produced and friends' motion dissociate, with only the latter showing sensitivity to orientation. Through the use of selectively disrupted avatar motion, our second experiment shows that self-recognition of facial motion is mediated by knowledge of the local temporal characteristics of one's own actions. Specifically, inverted self-recognition was unaffected by disruption of feature configurations and trajectories, but eliminated by temporal distortion. While actors lack third-person visual experience of their actions, they have a lifetime of proprioceptive, somatosensory, vestibular and first-person-visual experience. These sources of contingent feedback may provide actors with knowledge about the temporal properties of their actions, potentially supporting recognition of characteristic rhythmic variation when viewing self-produced motion. In contrast, the ability to recognize the motion signatures of familiar others may be dependent on configural topographic cues.

INTRINSIC AESTHETIC VALUE REVISTED

Abstract: Every sentient organism needs constantly to re‐assess its environment in order to adjust to any changes in it and to ascertain which aspects are, or become, salient for its current purposes. Such adaptation is of basic evolutionary importance, but for human beings it can be difficult to achieve in the face of radical novelty or when different frames of reference are in conflict. Art by virtue of its integrated structure presents examples of how a partial unification of experience may be envisaged. Art thus helps to meet our constant need for orientation and re‐orientation, though its operation in this respect is invariably outside consciousness. So art can be said to have intrinsic value only within a strictly subjective, phenomenological perspective; more broadly considered from a third‐person viewpoint, the value of art is instrumental. Questions then arise concerning our motivation for seeking or producing art, about the relation of art to other cultural activities, and about the role of pleasure in connection with aesthetic experience; these are briefly discussed.

Performance Comparison of Manual and Touch Interface using Video-based Behavior Analysis

The objective of this study is to quantitatively incorporate user observation into usability evaluation of mobile interfaces using monitoring techniques in first- and third-person points of view. In this study, an experiment was conducted to monitor and record users' behavior using Ergoneers Dikablis, a gaze tracking device. The experiment was done with 2 mobile phones each with a button keypad interface and a touchscreen interface for comparative analysis. The subjects included 20 people who have similar experiences and proficiency in using mobile devices. Data from video recordings were coded with Noldus Observer XT to find usage patterns and to gather quantitative data for analysis in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Results showed that the button keypad interface was generally better than the touchcreen interface. The movements of the fingers and gaze were much simpler when performing given tasks on the button keypad interface. While previous studies have mostly evaluated usability with performance measures by only looking at task results, this study can be expected to contribute by suggesting a method in which the behavioral patterns of interaction is evaluated.

Just You Wait

Just You Wait Matthew Brennan (bio) The Importance of Elsewhere, Jerry Bradley. Ink Brush Press: http://inkbrushpress.com. 77 pages; paper, $15.00. Texas poet Jerry Bradley's impressive first collection, Simple Versions of Disaster, appeared in 1991, bringing together more than a hundred poems. Now, close to two decades later, Ink Brush Press has released his second book, The Importance of Elsewhere, one of its initial offerings. Like the debut book, The Importance of Elsewhere deals with emotional subjects such as divorce, loneliness, and the bruises of childhood. But whereas Simple Versions typically creates distance from feeling through third-person point of view as well as wit and humor, many poems in the new collection are more directly personal, with autobiography undisguised. Still, reflections of the old manner return in each of the book's four sections, which end with one- or two-line poems that play wryly off their titles, like a stand-up comedian's jokes, and thus Bradley lightens the heavy melancholy of the preceding poems, which are mostly devoid of the earlier work's humor. As well crafted as Simple Versions, The Importance of Elsewhere is emotionally and imaginatively more powerful. On the back cover of the new book, David Vancil remarks on its difference from its predecessor. A representative poem in Simple Versions is "First Marriage," which dryly evokes the black humor in a bad union: after noting that a couple's "compliments passed / hand to hand like combat," Bradley places the husband at a motel and quips, quoting his postcard, "'Having wonderful time,' / he wrote. / 'Wish you were her.'" Bradley adopts this ironic technique in only four of Elsewhere's sixty-two poems, but they come emphatically at the ends of sections full of personal lyrics. The poem concluding the book is typical: After moving poems of relationships gone sour, from "The Sad Mistress" to "If and Weather" to "…and Forty Nights," Bradley chooses to restore some of the old humor in his final salvo: "How to Make Love to the Same Woman Forever / die young." These short poems not only successfully leaven the tone of a book of sorrows, but also allow a whiff of Bradley's earlier achievements. Indeed, the volume ends with two pages of excerpts from reviews of Simple Versions (nearly all from publications in Texas), a clear invitation to reconsider it and, as Vancil does, to compare the two books In one of these reviews, R. S. Gwynn notes the balance of free verse and formal poems in Bradley's first book; this range also distinguishes The Importance of Elsewhere. Bradley writes more than a dozen of the free verse poems in a style eschewing capitalization and punctuation—especially terminal. If this repetition of form risks mannerism, as I think it does in W. S. Merwin's work since the 1960s, most of the time Bradley's form expressively fits its subject. Exemplary of this type of poem is "Sunday Drive," one of the book's happier pieces. It vividly depicts a tour through "backroads and bayous" that culminates in a picnic, "outdoor sex," and finally drowsing irrationally "into waves" and elaborating "the lazy lake / like petals dreaming a peach." "At the Mental Health Clinic" employs a similar technique, but this time the open style evokes a diminished, unfixed sense of self: A therapy group sits "like dead mice / on the doorstep," their "having gone too far beyond" themselves "into someone else's yard." On the other hand, Bradley also builds poems in meter and rhyme, including multiple sonnets and lyrics in tercets. "Photographing the Cows" stands out among the sonnets, not only for its striking images and sounds, but particularly for its interwoven rhymes that are worthy of John Keats: abca cdbe fge fgd. Just as adept in rhyme, "Flying with the Crows" narrates another dream, but this time manifests the keenness of archetypal images through tercets: aba cdc efe. This intensity of sound effectively heightens the poem while keeping to natural syntax. However, the most memorable poems here unfold in punctuated free verse exploiting strong metaphors and telling closure. One of Bradley's best poems, "The Face of Vegetables," opens with a nine-line stanza equating...

The Continued Practice of ‘Ethos’: How Nissan Enables Organizational Knowledge Creation

This article examines knowledge creation in relation to improvements on the production line in the manufacturing department of Nissan Motor Company and aims to clarify embodied knowledge observed in the actions of organisational members who enable knowledge creation will be clarified. For that purpose, this study adopts an approach that adds a first, second, and third-person's viewpoint to the theory of knowledge creation (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Embodied knowledge, observed in the actions of organisational members who enable knowledge creation, is the continued practice of ‘ethos’ (in Greek) founded in Nissan Production Way as an ethical basis. Ethos is knowledge (intangible) assets for knowledge creating companies. Substantiated analysis classifies ethos into three categories: the individual, team and organisation. This indicates the precise actions of the organisational members in each category during the knowledge creation process. This research will be successful in its role of showing the indispensability of ethos—the new concept of knowledge assets, which enables knowledge creation—for future knowledge-based management in the knowledge society.

O aprendizado da utilização da substituição sensorial visuo-tátil por pessoas com deficiência visual: primeiras experiências e estratégias metodológicas

O sistema de substituição tátil-visual (TVSS) é uma tecnologia assistiva criada para ajudar deficientes visuais a perceberem aspectos visuais de seu ambiente através do tato e contribuir para sua inclusão social. Para melhor entender o processo de aprendizagem dessa tecnologia, quatro participantes cegos foram treinados com o Brainport®, a última versão do TVSS, onde imagens visuais transformadas são exploradas pela língua. O artigo objetiva de investigar o estágio inicial desse processo de aprendizagem, em termos tanto do desempenho dos participantes quanto da qualidade de sua experiência. O treinamento, conduzido de acordo com um método clínico-pedagógico, produziu dados em terceira pessoa e em primeira pessoa. Os dados foram obtidos através de registros de desempenho e de entrevistas de explicitação. Os resultados mostram que as maiores dificuldades surgidas foram relativas ao acoplamento sensório-motor, aos movimentos do corpo e da cabeça e à dissonância entre as expectativas e a qualidade da experiência perceptiva.

The Effect of Interactivity on Learning Physical Actions in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) offers new possibilities for learning, specifically for training individuals to perform physical movements such as physical therapy and exercise. The current article examines two aspects of VR that uniquely contribute to media interactivity: the ability to capture and review physical behavior and the ability to see one's avatar rendered in real time from third person points of view. In two studies, we utilized a state-of-the-art, image-based tele-immersive system, capable of tracking and rendering many degrees of freedom of human motion in real time. In Experiment 1, participants learned better in VR than in a video learning condition according to self-report measures, and the cause of the advantage was seeing one's avatar stereoscopically in the third person. In Experiment 2, we added a virtual mirror in the learning environment to further leverage the ability to see oneself from novel angles in real time. Participants learned better in VR than in video according to objective performance measures. Implications for learning via interactive digital media are discussed.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Understanding

The author contrasts the third-person or objective view of the self with the first-person view, and proposes that self-discovery often requires a dialogue between the first-person and third-person viewpoints. She reviews Descartes’ articulation of the ocular model and discusses related contributions and comments by Hume, Moore, and Wittgenstein. Knowledge of one’s own feelings is also addressed, with reference to the work of S. Cavell, Moran, Altieri, and Sartre. Literary illustrations are presented from two novels, by Austen and Flaubert, and Freud’s formulation of the concept of the ego is discussed in the light of these themes.

Virtusphere: Walking in a Human Size VR “Hamster Ball”

A major challenge for virtual reality (VR) interfaces is to provide realistic human interactions with the virtual world in more natural ways; one solution is to use a device called the VirtuSphere (VS). The VS provides a mechanism for walking in VR in semi-natural way; however, users have to adapt to walking in a moving platform, having limited visual feedback and integrating motion cues with physical responses. In this study we report on the challenges novice users of this virtual reality locomotion device encounter when performing navigation tasks in a virtual environment in two visual conditions (first-person and third-person viewpoint). We analyzed how performance, simulator sickness, and satisfaction vary under these two viewpoint conditions. We found that motion sickness and balance disturbance were more pronounced for the first-person viewpoint group than for the third-person group. However the first-person viewpoint group performed better and enjoyed the experience more than the third-person view group.

Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City

Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City

Contextual Features of Violent Video Games, Mental Models, and Aggression

This experiment employed a 2 (third vs. first person) × 2 (blood on/off) × 2 (sex) design in order to examine the effects of two internal video game manipulations: the presence of blood and point of view on participants’ perceptions of the game. Overall, when the blood manipulation was on, participants perceived greater gore. Players were significantly more focused when they played in the third-person point of view than when they played in first person. Males were more involved in the game overall regardless of point of view, but females were more focused and involved when they played in third, not first, person. In addition, we wanted to see if game manipulations and perceptions of the game affected aggressive outcomes. Those who played the game in the blood-on condition had more physically aggressive intentions, and when players were more involved and immersed in the game, they reported greater hostility and physically aggressive intentions. Findings are discussed as they relate to mental models of media violence.

First Persons: On Richard Moran's Authority and Estrangement

Richard Moran's Authority and Estrangement offers a subtle and innovative account of self-knowledge that lifts the problem out of the narrow confines of epistemology and into the broader context of practical reasoning and moral psychology. Moran argues convincingly that fundamental self/other asymmetries are essential to our concept of persons. Moreover, the first- and the third-person points of view are systematically interconnected, so that the expression or avowal of one's attitudes constitutes a substantive form of self-knowledge. But while Moran's argument is wide-ranging and compelling, he relies throughout on an overly intellectualized conception of first-person attitudes as attitudes of reflection or deliberation. That conception is at once implausible and unnecessary to the main current of his argument, whose goal is to demonstrate that our self-conception as persons depends on both the distinctness and the interconnectedness of our first- and third-person perspectives on ourselves.

The Emergence and Role of Client Perspectives in and on Cancer Treatment

This paper is divided into two parts: in part one I give some examples from a study of how patient or client perspectives on treatment and life with cancer are “discovered”, addressed, included and shaped within cancer research and treatment after World War 2. In this first part I draw on analyses from my Ph.D. thesis about the concept of quality of life and psycho-social research on cancer, in which I focused on the development and interrelationships between (1) welfare state forms of governance, (2) the practice of cancer treatment and its relation to research, and (3) client’s relations to treatment regimes and a life with cancer. I argue that the client’s perspective is represented in medical practice in many different, and often problematic, ways. A core problem is that this perspective is often represented from a third-person point of view, not from a direct first-person point of view. I find a number of reasons for this. The lack of first-person involvement is not isolated to medical practice but is also obvious in psycho-social practice that evolves in the relation to medical treatment and research in the last part of this century. The conflict around this is reflected in psychological theories about illness and disease that are formulated in this period. In the second part of the article I discuss the directions in which psychological theory has to develop in order to contribute to the recognition and involvement of first-person perspectives in medical treatment and research. The aim of this discussion is not limited to understanding how we as subjects handle everyday life with biological changes of bodily function.

Gender differences in dream perspectives.

A study exploring gender differences in self-reported dream perspectives was performed with 282 college students. Significantly more of the 164 women reported dreaming exclusively in first person and more of the 114 men exclusively in third person. Also, gender differences were found for those who dreamed in mixed perspective, a combination of first- and third-person points of view. Possible reasons for these differences were suggested and further research posited.