Verbal Testimony Research Articles

Conflicts of interest in submissions and testimonies to an Australian parliamentary inquiry on menopause.

Conflicts of interest (COIs) have the potential to create bias in research, policy and practice. Although disclosure cannot fully protect individuals and public policy from vested interests, it is an important step to support trust in scientific and public discourse, and transparency in decision-making. However, COIs are often unreported, underreported or difficult to identify. This study aimed to assess the extent to which COIs are voluntarily declared by those who make submissions to government inquiries relating to health, focusing on the 2024 Australian Senate inquiry into perimenopause and menopause. There was no guidance or formal requirement to provide COI declarations in written submissions to the inquiry. However, a statement about COI declarations was given by the Chair of the inquiry at the start of public hearings in which verbal testimony was given. All 284 written submissions and 163 verbal testimonies were reviewed to identify the number and nature of COIs declared. Only 1% of written submissions and 6% of verbal testimonies provided a COI statement. The amount and nature of information provided in COI declarations varied widely. To ensure transparency in decisions made as a result of public inquiries, governments should require that COIs be declared for all submissions. An explicit standardized guide is needed, with clear parameters about the type of detail needed for these declarations. Processes for dealing with COIs should also be clear in any reports or recommendations that are made from the evidence presented at such inquiries.

Conflict imaginaries in Algeria after the black decade: peace without reconciliation

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of fieldwork carried out in France and Algeria in the spring of 2019 with survivors of the Algerian civil war (the so-called black decade of the 1990s). Interviews were filmed, thus allowing close analysis of not only verbal testimony (including narratives, tropes, and pronouns) but also gestures and body language, amounting to what Wetherell (2012) calls ‘affective practice’. Analysing closely participant reactions to the amnesty and reconciliation policies of President Bouteflika, as well as their own representations of political violence, the article moves beyond Taylor’s (2004) definition of the social imaginary as ‘the ways in which people imagine their social existence’. Focusing on constructions of conflict, the article argues for a definition of conflict imaginaries as the following: the production and reproduction of constructions around violence mobilised through shared stories, tropes and vocabularies which are inflected by time, place, multiplicity, and evident across all of these, affective value. This facilitates an understanding of how those who have survived political violence in the past experience its legacy in the present. While this paradigm is generated from Algerian data, it is hoped that it may prove applicable to other conflict zones.

The Concept of ‘Will–generated Cognition’ and its Role in Philosophical Enterprise:

In epistemology, knowledge is the fundamental factor. In order to acquire knowledge, we have to go through various ways of knowing or the means of knowing like perception, inference, comparison, verbal testimony, presumption, non-cognition etc. In epistemology, knowledge presupposes the knowledge of something. The knowledge without content (aviṣayaka-jňāna), however, is found in case of AdvaitaVedānta. The Advaitins only admit a kind of knowledge which is of without content (aviṣayakajñāna) in case of Brahman. Brahman is the Knowledge itself. To them this knowledge has no content at all because Brahman itself is Knowledge, but not the knowledge of Brahman. In other words, we cannot tell that this is the knowledge of Brahman, but Brahman itself is Knowledge par-excellence. Apart from this system all others believe that knowledge has got some content of its own.1 That is why; knowledge is something through which an object is illumined. There are several ways of knowing as told earlier.

Ensuring the Right to a Fair Criminal Trial Using Communication Assistance

Given the emphasis on verbal testimony in Australian criminal trials, witnesses and accused experiencing communication barriers due to vulnerabilities such as age (i.e., child witnesses), cultural or language background (in particular, Indigenous Australians), physical disabilities, and mental impairment or cognitive disabilities may require support to provide evidence. Around Australia, such support is increasingly being provided by communication assistants or intermediaries. This paper argues that such assistance is a precursor to a fair trial, which is an international human rights law obligation stemming from Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (‘ICCPR’), as well as a common law right. There are gaps in coverage of communication assistance/intermediary schemes, including the complete absence of specific legislation and assistance in the Northern Territory, the limited eligibility criteria in jurisdictions that have introduced schemes, the lack of provision for Indigenous Australian people and people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (‘CALD’) backgrounds, and lack of provision for vulnerable accused (only two jurisdictions provide assistance to accused). These gaps should be addressed to ensure the right to a fair trial.

Dialogic Feed-Forward in Assessment: Pivotal to Learning but not Unproblematic

A key debate in higher education is how assessment and feedback can be constructed to maximize opportunities for meaningful student learning. In this paper, we explore how a learning-focused model of feedback, teacher-student dialogic feed-forward, is enacted in practice, exposing many affordances but also some challenges. Adopting a small-scale intensive approach, we trace the learning journeys of four students through a second-year undergraduate unit at a British university and on into their third and final year of study, accessing verbal testimony, teacher written comments on draft and final summative coursework, and student performance within and beyond the unit. We present in-depth student responses, understanding, behaviours, and achievement with respect to the feed-forward dialogue, revealing the subtleties of their reactions. Our findings evidence the transformative power of assessment dialogue on student learning for a range of achievers. Dialogic feed-forward can act as a pivotal moment in learning, where students reflect on their work, judge their standards against criteria, and co-create positive actions for improvement. Students develop cognitively, meta-cognitively, and affectively, becoming more comfortable with challenge and more productive in their learning. We conclude by widening our frame of reference to problematize dialogic feed-forward within current debates about higher education pedagogy.

A Psychoanalytical Approach of Body Memory in Asian Literature

This paper investigates the concept of body memory treated in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s <i>What the Body Remembers</i>. It deals not only with revealing the potential methods of remembering, but also how victims resort to alternative modes of memory and recovery. The late twentieth century has witnessed an increased emphasis on questions of memory as the generations which experienced the atrocities of the two world wars die out, and new or revived national movements build their demands on memories of oppression or trauma. Adopting a non-verbal source of inquiry, Shauna Singh Baldwin questions the unchallenged supremacy of the verbal testimony as a means for healing the self, emphasizing how South Asian Literary Texts themselves point toward non-textual sites of memory such as human body. Baldwin explores the dark tunnels of memory in which the revelation of the past occurs brilliantly through new generatively trans-textual intersections of memory, nationalism and narrative Scars, tattoos, post-memory, and reincarnation are among the new modes presented by this Indian author. In this vein, I claim that the text comes out to suggest new ways in which human body can preserve and displays individual and collective memory. I shall also discuss the extent to which the female body potentially facilitate the act of remembering denying the importance of the language structure.

Drawing Kafka’s Castle

Abstract We investigated the effects of narrative perspective on mental imagery by comparing responses to an English translation of Franz Kafka’s Das Schloß (The Castle) in the published version (narrated in the third person) versus an earlier (first-person) draft. We analysed participants’ pencil drawings of their imaginative experience for presence/absence of specific features (K. and the castle) and for image entropy (a proxy for image unpredictability). We also used word embeddings to perform cluster analysis of participants’ verbal free-response testimony, generating thematic clusters independently of experimenter expectations. We found no effects of text version on feature presence or overall entropy, but an effect on entropy variance, which was higher in the third-person condition. There was also an effect of text version on free responses: Readers of the third-person version were more likely to use words associated with mood and atmosphere. We offer conclusions on “Kafkaesque” aesthetics, cognitive realism, and the future of experimental literary studies.

The scope of the pramāṇas in classical and postclassical Sāṃkhya

ABSTRACT One of the lively polemics between Buddhists and Naiyāyikas is devoted to the question of whether each pramāṇa—means of knowledge—has an independent scope of validity, which does not overlap the scopes of other pramāṇas, or whether more than one pramāṇa can be applied to the same object. Dignāga and continuators of his thought defend pramāṇa-vyavasthā, ‘autonomy of [the object spheres of] pramāṇas,’ while Naiyāyikas defend the opposing conception, called pramāṇa-samplava, ‘coalescence of [the object spheres of] pramāṇas.’ Scholars usually ascribe pramāṇa-vyavasthā to Sāṃkhya. This paper explores the classical and postclassical Sāṃkhya view of the scope of the pramāṇas and shows that Sāṃkhya did not follow pramāṇa-vyavasthā. In Sāṃkhya, the scopes of perception and inference for knowing perceptible objects overlap, while inference for knowing supersensible objects and reliable verbal testimony have autonomous object spheres. However, there is also a tendency toward pramāṇa-vyavasthā in Sāṃkhya, which is in conflict with the Sāṃkhya theory of pramāṇas.

Rank and Two Aspects of Dress in Elizabethan England

As a contribution to the nascent field of historical anthropology, this paper considers the relation between two aspects of Elizabethan dress and the social order of early modern England. Both the sumptuary legislation which governed dress, and the ornamentation which adorned it are seen to articulate and reconcile the conflicting principles out of which the Elizabethan hierarchy was created. In conclusion, it is suggested that dress and other material aspects of culture assume a special significance for the historical anthropologist. Deprived of verbal testimony, the historical anthropologist must attach new importance to the extant objects in which the ideas, preoccupations and contradictions of culture still adhere.

Children’s developing capacity to calibrate the verbal testimony of others with observed evidence when inferring causal relations

Across two studies (N = 120), we investigated the development of children’s ability to calibrate the certainty of verbal testimony with observable data that varied in the degree of predictive causal accuracy. In Study 1, 4- and 5-year-olds heard a certain explanation or an uncertain explanation about deterministic causal relations. The 5-year-olds made more accurate causal inferences when the informant provided a certain and more calibrated explanation. In Study 2, children heard similar explanations about probabilistic relations, making the uncertain informant more calibrated. The 5-year-olds were more likely to infer the correct causal relations when the informant was uncertain, but only when the explanation was attuned to the stochasticity of the individual causal events (or outcomes that sometimes occur). These findings imply that the capacity to integrate, and make efficient inferences, from distinct sources of knowledge emerges during the preschool years.

Vulnerability to interrogative suggestibility from negative life events. A comparison of separated asylum-seeking youth and age-matched peers.

The consistency of young asylum-seeker's verbal testimony is often critical in determining the outcome of their claims. It is well established that an interviewee may change their answers to appease an interviewer or in response to suggestions. Experiencing adversity during childhood may increase vulnerability in such interview situations. Here, the vulnerability to interview pressure of asylum-seeking youth separated from their caregivers as minors was compared with age-matched peers. Thirty participants (16–23 years) completed the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (GSS2, measures of negative life events (NLEs) and non-verbal cognitive functioning measures. Vulnerability to interrogative suggestibility, non-verbal cognitive functioning and number of NLEs was compared between two groups. This preliminary data showed asylum-seeking youth as significantly more vulnerable to Shift; changes in response to interviewer feedback. NLEs and lower non-verbal cognitive functioning were significantly more common among the separated youth increasing vulnerability to Shift. The implications are discussed.

Children's Use of Testimony to Determine Reality Status.

Verbal testimony about reality status is critical but often contradictory. These studies address whom children consider reliable sources of information about reality and how they evaluate conflicting testimony. In Study 1, seventy 4- to 8-year-olds heard an adult or child provide testimony about how to cook food and use toys, and about the reality of unfamiliar entities. Children selected the adult for food and the child for toys. Six- and 8-year-olds also selected the adult regarding reality. In Study 2, ninety 4- to 8-year-olds heard conflicting reality information from children and adults. Six- to 8-year-olds endorsed adult and child claims differentially and stated that adults knew more. By age 6, children favor adult testimony about reality over that of children.

Epistemic Vigilance in Early Ontogeny: Children's Use of Nonverbal Behavior to Detect Deception.

This study examines the development of children's ability to modulate their trust in verbal testimony as a function of nonverbal behavior. Participants included 83 children (26 four-year-olds, 29 five-year-olds, and 28 six-year-olds) that were tasked with locating a toy hidden in one of two boxes. Before deciding the location, participants watched a video of an adult providing verbal and nonverbal cues about the location of the toy. We hypothesized that older children would display epistemic vigilance, trusting nonverbal information over verbal information when the two conflict. Consistent with our expectations, when sources were consistent, all children trusted the verbal testimony. By contrast, and as predicted, when they were inconsistent, only 6-year-olds distrusted verbal testimony and favored nonverbal cues; 4- and 5-year-olds continued to trust verbal testimony. Thus, 6-year-old children demonstrate an ability to modulate their trust in verbal testimony as a function of nonverbal information. Younger children's inability to do this is not due to their being unaware of non-verbal behavior; indeed, when nonverbal information was offered exclusively, children of all ages used it to find the object.

Show or tell: Children's learning about food from action vs verbal testimony.

Childhood obesity continues to be a critical health concern in the United States. Nonetheless, interventions that focus on delivering verbal lessons about food and health to children in preschool classrooms have had only modest effects. The present study examines the relative effectiveness of showing vs telling children about food to promote healthy eating, with a focus on unfamiliar foods and vegetables. Three- to six-year-old children (n = 71) were tested in a laboratory study in which they watched videos of two people eating apple-broccoli puree. One person took five bites of the food; the other said they liked the food. Children did not differentiate between the food they saw someone eat and the food they heard someone talk about. Children's food intake was negatively associated with parent reports of children's eating behavior on the Food Fussiness subscale of the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire. We found similar patterns in an analogous toy task. In an unfamiliar object task, children selected the action demonstration as the right way to use the object. We find no evidence that action vs verbal testimony is more persuasive in guiding children's food choices, but action testimony may be persuasive in other domains. The associations between children's food intake and pickiness provide growing evidence of alignment between parent assessments of their children's typical eating behavior and children's food choices in laboratory studies.

Variability in toddlers’ ability to verbally update their mental representations of absent objects

Early in development children rely on other people’s verbal testimony to acquire information about things that are not available to their immediate perception. There is evidence that children as young as 22 months can use language to learn about an object that undergoes a property change (e.g., “Lucy got wet”) out of their sight. If the verbal input conveys a change in the location of an absent object (e.g., “The puppy is moved from the bag to the box”), 30-month-olds successfully use this information and find the object in its new location, whereas the majority of 23-month-olds perseverate to the object’s initial location. These findings suggest that young children’s ability to use verbal testimony to update their mental representations of absent entities shows variability within and across tasks. The goal of the current research was to replicate the pattern of performance observed in previous cross-sectional studies within the same group of children. A total of 59 2-year-olds (Mage = 26.9 months, range = 21.4–34.5) were administered two versions of verbal updating tasks: property and location change. As a group, children showed more variable performance when they learned about a change in an object’s location (58% success) than when they learned about a change in its property (75% success). Moreover, comparison of individual children’s performance across the two tasks revealed that at this age children found the location change harder to update than the property change. We discuss possible explanations for children’s differential performance on verbal updating tasks involving property and location change.

Automated Border Control: Criminalizing the “Hidden Intent” of Migrant Embodiment

I argue that we are entering an automated era of border control that I label a border-biosecurity industrial complex. Funded in great part by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), scientific research and automated surveillance technologies promise the state innovative and supposedly unbiased solutions to the challenge of border control and security. This article spotlights a border surveillance technology called AVATAR (Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessment in Real-Time).&#x0D; Analyzing this technology, which was funded by the DHS and developed by faculty at the University of Arizona’s National Center for Border Security and Immigration (BORDERS), allows me to assess how the emphasis on novel technologies to detect terrorists unleashes the search for ubiquitous surveillance devices programmed to detect deviant behavioral and physiological movements. I offer a wider view of this technology-in-the-making by analyzing how university research in aerial defense, the psychology of deception, the life sciences, and computer engineering influences the development of surveillance devices and techniques.&#x0D; I explore how, during a posthuman era, automated technologies detect and racialize “suspect life” under the guise of scientific neutrality and supposedly free from human interference. Suspect life refers to the racial bias preprogrammed into algorithms that compute danger or risk into certain human movements and regions such as border zones. As these technologies turn the body into matter, they present biological life as a more scientifically verifiable truth than human verbal testimony, moving border control from the adjudication of law through the subjective interview to the automated body that speaks a truth more powerful than a complex story can tell.

Innate Intuition: An Intellectual History of Sahaja-jñāna and Sahaja Samādhi in Brahmoism and Modern Vaiṣṇavism

This article is about sahaja-jñāna, or ‘innate intuition’, as a form of Brahmo and Vaiṣṇava epistemology—a foundational invention within the development of modern Hinduism. I examine its nineteenth-century intellectual history in Bengal in the works of the Vaiṣṇava theologian Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda (1838–1914) and trace it back to two of his contemporaries, Keshub Chandra Sen (1838–1884) and a senior leader of the Brahmo Samaj whom they both knew, Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905). This relatively understudied yet epistemologically significant term within modern Hinduism has its roots in the pre-colonial sahajiyā movements and bears a conceptual resemblance to the idea of pratibhā in ancient Indian aesthetics, philosophy, and grammar. The idea of sahaja is key among the sahajiyā Vaiṣṇavas, a so-called heterodox group that Western-educated, middle-class Bengali bhadraloks, including Bhaktivinoda, vehemently disassociated themselves from due to the social stigma attached to its sexo-yogic practices. Furthermore, I argue that Bhaktivinoda’s concept of sahaja-jñāna departs significantly from both sahajiyā and Brahmo versions of sahaja-jñāna and represents an innovation within the ambit of Vaiṣṇava Vedanta, which accepts verbal testimony (śabda or śāstra) as the only valid form of epistemology. In documenting the intellectual history of a significant idea, I contend that the bhadralok Bengali Vaiṣṇava leaders arrogate, desexualize, and Vedānticize a term as a form of experimentation during the construction of modern Hinduism.

The detection of deception during trials: Ignoring the nonverbal communication of witnesses is not the solution—A response to Vrij and Turgeon (2018)

In their paper ‘Evaluating credibility of witnesses—Are we instructing jurors on invalid factors?’, Vrij and Turgeon (2018) argue that jurors should be advised not to consider demeanour when trying to evaluate if witnesses are honest or dishonest because of ‘overwhelming scientific evidence’. However, in this response, we contend that substantial empirical scientific studies on nonverbal communication alongside the limitations of deception detection research, as cited by Vrij and Turgeon (2018), undermine their overall argument. While jurors should be warned about erroneous beliefs and dubious concepts on human communication, jurors should also be advised to consider demeanour as a way of enriching their overall understanding of witnesses and their verbal testimony.

The Karaim Space of Trakai in the Local Lore and the Legend of the Miraculous Horse of the Duke Vytautas

Several dozens of Karaims still residing in Trakai may be regarded as the true inhabitants of the town, considering that at least several generations of them lived there. While analyzing their life stories collected during fieldwork in 2008–2018, and comparing them to the testimonies of other Trakai dwellers describing Karaims, it becomes clear that Karaims have a number of definite places making up their “own” space and a meaningful topography. This typography comprises the northern part of the Trakai Peninsula, the northwestern suburban territories and the nearby lakes. In the oral tradition, part of the Trakai Peninsula attributed to Karaims bears the name Karaimščizna or Karaimų gatvė (‘Karaim Street’). It runs from the Chapel of St. John of Nepomuk to the so-called Iron Bridge in the neck between Galvė Lake and Totoriškės Lake. Not only Karaims, but also other ethnic groups residing in Trakai define this area as special in linguistic, religious, social, economic, and urban sense. From the social perspective, Karaims enjoy certain double status: being the “original” inhabitants of Trakai, they are also the most singular and the least known ones. Stories by the other ethnic groups abound in descriptions of certain “strangeness” of the Karaims. In the 15th – 18th centuries, Karaims enjoyed certain autonomy in this part of the town. At that period, two towns endowed with the Magdeburg rights co-existed in the small Trakai Peninsula – the Karaim town and the Christian town. Even today, Karaims consider their historical part of the town to be the “real Trakai”. Karaims are outstanding in terms of their particularly strong community bonds, including common religion, ethnic origins, history, and kinship. In general, the sense of community largely defines the special Karaim attitude to Trakai. For them, the town is not just a place of residence, but also a meaningful space in terms of the common historical, celebratory, family and everyday experiences. The common experience is also evident in the famous Karaim legend describing the miraculous horse of the Duke Vytautas. This legend starts with the time of the Karaims settling in Trakai under the rule of Vytautas the Great. After a particularly harsh winter, the spring tide causes the lakes surrounding Trakai to spill over, and the flood threatens to drown the part of the town inhabited by the Karaims. However, the horse of Vytautas gulps down the water, and the next morning a new lake appears in the horse’s pasture, emitting strange smell. Different variants of the legend point to several lakes, but all of them are within area that is meaningful to Karaims, and close to the former communal lands, the so-called Karaim fields. Historians and folklorists investigating this legend so far have mostly concentrated on the image of Vytautas. The author of this article treats this legend as a source presenting the places that Karaims consider important, and their daily routines (their main trade was growing vegetables, particularly cucumbers). This legend also provides evidence of the attempts undertaken by the 20th century Karaim intelligentsia at establishing the modern Karaim identity. The best-known variants of this legend were recorded in the 20th century by Abraomas Šišmanas (Abraham Szyszman) and the senior hazzan Simonas Firkovičius. Both of them paid great interest to the Karaim culture during the interwar period, spreading certain important messages in their folklore recordings as well. These include, for instance, the depiction of Karaims as warriors. This legend merits consideration in terms of space and the Karaim everyday life, particularly in the context of the fieldwork data collected in the 21st century, and observations of the Karaim life style. The legend in question emerges as the verbal testimony of the people coming from the Black Sea region and struggling to adapt in the completely new surroundings, characterized by entirely different climate – long winters and lots of water.

Bhartṛhari and verbal testimony: a ‘hyper-antireductionist’ approach?

The grammarian and philosopher Bhartṛhari (5 th . c. CE) developed a philosophy that is essentially characterized by the prominent role language has in structuring humans’ efforts to cope with reality. Within this broader picture, he adopted an epistemological standpoint that was somehow at odds with the standard view of other South Asian thinkers, usually founded on a careful and systematic distinction of the means able to lead to a reliable cognitive event (technically called pramāṇa s). Bhartṛhari claimed that such an interpretation is rather artificial, and that a cognition is actually a multifaceted process, whose single components are almost always hard to pinpoint. His main theoretical contribution consists of affirming that such a multifaceted cognitive act is informed and shaped by language. The article deals with Bhartṛhari’s epistemology by discussing the author’s opinion on the nature of testimony. Furthermore, it addresses the question whether pure inference should always be regarded as an accurate way of acquiring knowledge.