Workings Of Mind Research Articles

Broadening Relevance: The Polemic Property of Concepts in Metaphorical Language

The lexical pragmatic processes that relevance theory heavily relies on to account for communication are problematic. Broadening and narrowing no longer seem suitable to explain how “conceptual” meanings are modified in the comprehension processes if considering recent developments around the concept definitions and how the mind works. Using theoretical suggestions in psycholinguistics to shed light on the issue raised, the paper makes two main suggestions. Firstly, the account of concepts in relevance theory should be reconsidered to allow for more flexibility. An account of metaphors based on pragmatic adjustment of one of its constituents under the influence of another, as well as contextual assumption, does not seem a viable mental process involved in metaphor comprehension since it should not only allow flexibility of semantic associations but also a reconsideration of concepts as entities and encyclopaedical information as mere conceptual characteristics. Secondly, more cultural awareness and influence should be integrated into the relevance theoretical account of meaning since cultural traits are often considered by speakers in reaching relevance. Moreover, pre-existing conceptual knowledge varies greatly between individuals and thus the comprehension of metaphor should no longer be treated as a static process but rather a highly dynamic one.

“Herbarium Polonorum” (“Heimatphotographie”)

The main theme of the text is the wartime and postwar history of the area of the German Nazi extermination camp Treblinka II, seen from the perspective of the production of landscape – with a special focus on the identity aspect, i.e. the nationalization of nature and the naturalization of the nation. The argument refers to imaging conventions of nature and ethnographic photography, like the German Heimatphotographie and the Polish Fatherland Photography, that go along with landscape production. This paper also touches upon the issue of classification as the principle organizing the workings of the human mind as well as the uses made of classification in terms of cognition and identity – up to and including the deadly consequences thereof. Another crucial point of reference is the history of the herbarium as a form of organizing knowledge (Maria Sibylla Merian, Rosa Luxemburg, Szymon Syreński) and its connections with the visual arts (Krzysztof Jung, Alina Szapocznikow). The rich iconography illustrates the analyzed representation patterns, with particular focus on the axiosemiotics of Polish antisemitism, going back to its elitist forms in Jagiellonian Poland. The text summarizes fifteen years of the author’s work on Herbarium, a photographic project carried out on the site of the former German Nazi extermination camp Treblinka II.

Nurse Sensemaking for Responding to Patient and Family Safety Concerns.

Hospitals need to prevent, respond to, and learn from safety risks and events perceived by patients and families, who in turn rely on nurses to respond to and report their safety concerns. The aim of the study was to describe the process by which bedside nurses evaluate and determine the appropriate response to safety concerns expressed by patients or their families. A qualitative design was employed. We recruited inpatient bedside nurses in an 811-bed Midwest academic medical center. Nurses provided demographic information and participated in semistructured interviews designed to elicit narratives related to evaluation and response to patient- or family-expressed safety concerns. Data analysis and interpretation were guided by grounded theory. We enrolled 25 nurses representing 22 units. Based on these nurses' experiences, we developed a grounded theory explaining how nurses evaluate a patient or family safety concern. Nurses make sense of the patient's or family's safety concern in order to take action. Achieving this goal requires evaluation of the meaningfulness and reasonableness of the concern, as well as the potential effect of the concern on the patient. Based on this nursing evaluation, nurses respond in ways designed to (a) manage emotions, (b) immediately resolve concerns, (c) involve other team members, and (d) address fear or uncertain grounding in reality. Nurses reported routinely handling safety concerns at the bedside without use of incident reporting. Safety requires an interpersonal and evaluative nursing process with actions responsive to patient and family concerns. Safety interventions designed to be used by nurses should be developed with the dynamic, cognitive, sensemaking nature of nurses' routine safety work in mind. Being sensitive to the vulnerability of patients, respecting patient and family input, and understanding the consequences of dismissing patient and family safety concerns are critical to making sense of the situation and taking appropriate action to maintain safety. Measuring patient safety or planning improvement based on patient or family expression of safety concerns would be a difficult undertaking using only standard approaches. A more complex approach incorporating direct patient engagement in data collection is necessary to gain a complete safety picture.

Dostoevsky, Confession, and the Evolutionary Origins of Conscience

AbstractFyodor Dostoevsky is renowned as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature, but what we know about the origins and the workings of the human mind has changed drasti­cally since the late nineteenth century. If Dostoevsky was such a sensitive reader of the human condition, do his insights hold up to modern research? To judge just by the issue of the psychology of confession, the answer appears to be: yes. The work of Michael Tomasel­lo indicates that the human conscience evolved in order to make people obey group norms. From this I draw the proposition that confession should be best directed to the group as a whole, and not to an individual. Judging by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and an assortment of characters in The Brothers Karamazov, this appears to be exactly how confes­sion works in Dostoevsky’s novels: sin is against all, so forgiveness must be from all.

Reprint of: The vision of Developmental Teaching and Learning and Bloom's Taxonomy of educational objectives

Abstract Several well-known concepts in contemporary psychology and education are scrutinized from the standpoint of Developmental Teaching and Learning (DTL) framework grounded in Piotr Galperin's research. In particular, DTL reveals the need to take a fresh look at and radically revise the key suppositions that underlie the currently influential Bloom's Taxonomy of educational objectives. From the DTL perspective, the Taxonomy has multiple conceptual problems – it reflects a number of deeply entrenched and widely spread misconceptions about how the human mind works, how students learn, and therefore, how teachers need to teach. The major issue is that the Taxonomy is implicitly based on outdated mentalist assumptions and on the mechanistic model of human cognition as “information processing.” By contrast, DTL argues that knowledge is not “information” but rather a set of activities; activities cannot be “stored and retrieved” but can only be developed, enacted, and re-enacted. Thinking about the mind and students' cognitive abilities in terms of activities that are inseparable from the acting person, rather than in misleading terms of stages and levels of “objective information processing,” changes the entire discourse about educational goals, learning, and teaching.

The computational origin of representation.

Each of our theories of mental representation provides some insight into how the mind works. However, these insights often seem incompatible, as the debates between symbolic, dynamical, emergentist, sub-symbolic, and grounded approaches to cognition attest. Mental representations-whatever they are-must share many features with each of our theories of representation, and yet there are few hypotheses about how a synthesis could be possible. Here, I develop a theory of the underpinnings of symbolic cognition that shows how sub-symbolic dynamics may give rise to higher-level cognitive representations of structures, systems of knowledge, and algorithmic processes. This theory implements a version of conceptual role semantics by positing an internal universal representation language in which learners may create mental models to capture dynamics they observe in the world. The theory formalizes one account of how truly novel conceptual content may arise, allowing us to explain how even elementary logical and computational operations may be learned from a more primitive basis. I provide an implementation that learns to represent a variety of structures, including logic, number, kinship trees, regular languages, context-free languages, domains of theories like magnetism, dominance hierarchies, list structures, quantification, and computational primitives like repetition, reversal, and recursion. This account is based on simple discrete dynamical processes that could be implemented in a variety of different physical or biological systems. In particular, I describe how the required dynamics can be directly implemented in a connectionist framework. The resulting theory provides an "assembly language" for cognition, where high-level theories of symbolic computation can be implemented in simple dynamics that themselves could be encoded in biologically plausible systems.

How the Bible Is Written

How the Bible Is Written

Training Theories of Mind in Post-conflict Northern Uganda

ABSTRACT A great number of foreign NGOs have established programs in northern Uganda to treat mental ill health following the armed conflict. In this article, I explore how NGOs train local Acholi counselors to work with psychiatric notions of trauma and practice counseling with local clients. The training of counselors and the practice of psychotherapeutic counseling cultivates specific notions of what trauma is and how the mind works. I show how psychiatric concepts are introduced and practiced in new settings and reshaped by local concerns, while I contribute theoretically by framing these within an attentional learning approach.

Smart Sensing: An Info-Structural Model of Cognition for Non-Interacting Agents

This study explores an info-structural model of cognition for non-interacting agents affected by human sensation, perception, emotion, and affection. We do not analyze the neuroscientific or psychological debate concerning the human mind working, but we underline the importance of modeling the above cognitive levels when designing artificial intelligence agents. Our aim was to start a reflection on the computational reproduction of intelligence, providing a methodological approach through which the aforementioned human factors in autonomous systems are enhanced. The presented model must be intended as part of a larger one, which also includes concepts of attention, awareness, and consciousness. Experiments have been performed by providing visual stimuli to the proposed model, coupling the emotion cognitive level with a supervised learner to produce artificial emotional activity. For this purpose, performances with Random Forest and XGBoost have been compared and, with the latter algorithm, 85% accuracy and 92% coherency over predefined emotional episodes have been achieved. The model has also been tested on emotional episodes that are different from those related to the training phase, and a decrease in accuracy and coherency has been observed. Furthermore, by decreasing the weight related to the emotion cognitive instances, the model reaches the same performances recorded during the evaluation phase. In general, the framework achieves a first emotional generalization responsiveness of 94% and presents an approximately constant relative frequency related to the agent’s displayed emotions.

Important Books by Members of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story

The Society for the Study of the American Short Story consists of serious researchers of all ages, from graduate students, to the professorial ranks, to senior scholars who have continued their work into retirement. As a collective organization, their scholarship covers the historical record of short fiction from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Their volumes have appeared from a spectrum of publishers, most of them from university presses but others from commercial houses, independent media, and reference companies. They utilize an impressive range of critical and theoretical approaches from standard historical and biographical studies, to explorations of issues of race and ethnicity, to contemporary social configurations as well as penetrating psychological studies that challenge conventional understandings of the working of the human mind. It is an impressive body of intellectual work, one that deserves to be fully articulated and understood by the literary community.The following list of books by members of the society is offered in the hope that it will assist members in their ongoing research on the American short story. At the same time, it informs the society at large about the contributions of their colleagues to the rapidly expanding body of important scholarship on the genre of short fiction. It also helps counter the general impression that “the novel” is the only important subject and that shorter works, from the tale to flash fiction, have received essentially little attention. A listing of principal scholarly books by members of the society graphically illustrates how much significant work they have done over the last few decades. It can only suggest the magnitude of crucially vital work that is currently in progress and that will appear in the years ahead.

Introduction: Calcutta characters

Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in ...

Beyond the Platonic Brain: facing the challenge of individual differences in function-structure mapping

In their attempt to connect the workings of the human mind with their neural realizers, cognitive neuroscientists often bracket out individual differences to build a single, abstract model that purportedly represents (almost) every human being’s brain. In this paper I first examine the rationale behind this model, which I call ‘Platonic Brain Model’. Then I argue that it is to be surpassed in favor of multiple models allowing for patterned inter-individual differences. I introduce the debate on legitimate (and illegitimate) ways of mapping neural structures and cognitive functions, endorsing a view according to which function-structure mapping is context-sensitive. Building on the discussion of the ongoing debate on the function(s) of the so-called Fusiform “Face” Area, I show the necessity of indexing function-structure mappings to some populations of subjects, clustered on the basis of factors such as their expertise in a given domain.

Pamela Collins—driving forward global mental health

Pamela Collins has always wanted to understand how the mind works and what drives behaviour. “As a student and later clinical trainee, I desperately wanted perspectives on mental health and illness beyond European-American frameworks”, she tells The Lancet Psychiatry. She gained some of those perspectives through her early research working with Black and Latina women with severe mental illness in New York City to understand HIV risk and avenues to prevention.

First person profile: C. Norman Coleman, MD: A leading radiation and medical oncologist, Dr. Coleman has worked to improve cancer prevention, treatment, and quality of life on a global level.

First person profile: C. Norman Coleman, MD: A leading radiation and medical oncologist, Dr. Coleman has worked to improve cancer prevention, treatment, and quality of life on a global level.

Validity of Cognitive Tests for Non-human Animals: Pitfalls and Prospects.

Comparative psychology assesses cognitive abilities and capacities of non-human animals and humans. Based on performance differences and similarities in various species in cognitive tests, it is inferred how their minds work and reconstructed how cognition might have evolved. Critically, such species comparisons are only valid and meaningful if the tasks truly capture individual and inter-specific variation in cognitive abilities rather than contextual variables that might affect task performance. Unlike in human test psychology, however, cognitive tasks for non-human primates (and most other animals) have been rarely evaluated regarding their measurement validity. We review recent studies that address how non-cognitive factors affect performance in a set of commonly used cognitive tasks, and if cognitive tests truly measure individual variation in cognitive abilities. We find that individual differences in emotional and motivational factors primarily affect performance via attention. Hence, it is crucial to systematically control for attention during cognitive tasks to obtain valid and reliable results. Aspects of test design, however, can also have a substantial effect on cognitive performance. We conclude that non-cognitive factors are a minor source of measurement error if acknowledged and properly controlled for. It is essential, however, to validate and eventually re-design several primate cognition tasks in order to ascertain that they capture the cognitive abilities they were designed to measure. This will provide a more solid base for future cognitive comparisons within primates but also across a wider range of non-human animal species.

Rethinking educational theory and practice in times of visual media: Learning as image-concept integration

We propose a new relational direction in higher education that acknowledges external and internal images as integrated in thinking and learning. We expand educational theory and practice that commonly rely on discrete conceptual developments that exclude images. Our argument epistemologically relies on certain semiotic views that consider the role of iconic signs and iconicity (meaning making by the virtue of similarity) as significant in relation to knowledge and learning. The analogical and imaginative work required to discover similarity between external pictures and any educational concept is a form of iconic mind work that opens a space for transformational thinking and creative solutions. The novelty of our argument lies in the schematic philosophy of mind by C.S. Peirce, and specifically, an adaptation of Peirce’s triadic sign diagram for learning, exemplified via an ‘inquiry graphic’ sign and reflective method. This outlook seeks connections in diversity, arguing for an education that acknowledges and teaches intrinsic human relatedness to other humans, beings and things in the environment, thus challenging any notions of anthropocentrism and superiority. It calls for a reaction in international higher education to acknowledge the iconicity of concepts and thinking and embrace integrated image-concept signs for deep and critical teaching-learning, towards a modest educational contribution to counteracting social and environmental crises.

Discussing the Conditional Probability from a Cognitive Psychological Perspective

Probability signifies the most obscure and the least achievable content among other mathematics areas; particularly, the conditional probability concept that should not be left behind any standard course of probability from primary to university level. Moreover, understanding the conditional probability becomes more serious when the discussion fits into the field of teacher education, wherein the prospective mathematics teachers need not only to learn it but also to promote their pupils’ conditional probability reasoning. From this aspect, the current study aims at exploring the prospective mathematics teachers’ conditional probability reasoning from a cognitive psychological perspective that focuses on how their minds work. Accordingly, the generic inductive approach has been employed. Hence, a purposive sample of the university students who study in a four-year mathematics teacher preparation program has been selected. After analyzing the school curriculum of probability, an authentic conditional probability situation has been utilized. Following this, the students’ interpretations have been translated, coded, and categorized using NVivo software. As a result, the generalizer (58.8%), conservative (11.8%), correlational (23.5%), and the rational thinker (5.9%) have been defined as the primary models of conditional probability reasoning. Furthermore, while the generalizer and conservative thinkers both share the anchoring and adjustment bias, the illusion of validity has been operated by only the conservatives. Besides, the one-step, availability, causality, and gambler fallacy, were the correlational thinkers' assigned biases. On the other side, the rational thinkers have reached a high level of contextual knowledge, with understanding the idea of sample space reduction.

Divanü Lûgat-it-Türk’te Felsefî İçerikler

Felsefe dille yapılan ve dilde ortaya çıkan bir çalışmadır. Varlığı, insanı, toplumu, ahlâk ve değeri ifade edebilme gücü, bir dilin felsefe potansiyelini de ortaya koyar. Büyük felsefelerin üretildiği diller, varlığı ayrıntılı ve kapsayıcı bir şekilde düşünmeye izin veren dillerdir. Felsefe ve dil arasındaki “dönüşümlü” ve “karşılıklı” ilişki, sadece dilden düşünceye değil, düşünceden dile doğru da yansır; en geniş anlamıyla varlığa verilen anlam, varlığı ifade etmedeki yetenek ve beceri, dilin gelişmesi ve zenginleşmesi yönünde bir katkıdır. Dilin potansiyeli felsefenin, felsefenin potansiyeli de dilin imkânıdır. Dil ile zihin arasındaki yakın ilişki dikkate alındığında, Divanü Lûgat-it-Türk’ün doğrudan kendi dönemindeki ortak akıl ve zihniyete tanıklık ettiği düşünülebilir. Divanü Lûgat-it-Türk, Türk kültürünün en eski ve en önemli metinlerinden biridir. Yabancılara Türkçe öğretmek amacıyla yazılan bu eser, basit anlamıyla bir sözlük çalışması değil, dil öğretiminin somutlaştırıcı ve örnekleyici yapısı gereği şiir, atasözü, hikâye, folklor gibi dönemin dil ve kültür birikiminden örnekler sunan bir “seçki” niteliğindedir. Bu anlamda insan, Tanrı ve evren tasavvuru çerçevesinde Türkçenin felsefe potansiyelinin ilk defa en ileri derecede sergilendiği eserlerden biridir. Bu makale, söz konusu metindeki felsefî içeriği ele almayı ve bu içerikten örnekler sunmayı amaçlamaktadır. Çalışmada kelimler, deyimler, atasözleri, şiirler, hikâyeler, örnek cümleler, felsefî içerik ve çağrışımları açısından ele alınacaktır. Bu birikim, felsefenin bütüncül bakışını yansıtacak şekilde: (1) varlık anlayışı, (2) bilgi anlayışı, (3) insan anlayışı, (4) etik ve estetik değerler çerçevesinde olacaktır.

A Lacanian Interpretation of Chopin's The Story of An Hour &Storm

Any Psychoanalytical interpretation focuses primarily on the inner workings of human mind. Freud originated psychoanalysis and Lacan reoriented it. Freud found the term ‘unconscious’ which Lacan modified and made the most essential subject of his Psychoanalytical theory. He believed that the desire is formed through the Symbolic Other and Imaginary other in the formation of Jouissance. He maintained that desire exists due to the presence of the Other. In naming it, the subject goes on attaining newer forms and shapes or roles. In fact, desire hides itself in discourse which never presents it fully or never gives it a full expression and as such there remains a leftover – a surplus of desire is invariably present in the discourse. This notion made Lacan to shape his faith and belief that desire is the desire of / for the Other. For him, desire is central to all human roles, endeavors or activities. It gives birth to almost all Lacanian concepts and as such is named in the presence of the Other. It is generally believed that Chopin’s fiction is highly pregnant with Lacanian realm of desire or symbolic and almost all her stories seem an exploration of the self, other and social assertion of individuality.

Editors' Review and Introduction: Levels of Explanation in Cognitive Science: From Molecules to Culture.

Cognitive science began as a multidisciplinary endeavor to understand how the mind works. Since the beginning, cognitive scientists have been asking questions about the right methodologies and levels of explanation to pursue this goal, and make cognitive science a coherent science of the mind. Key questions include: Is there a privileged level of explanation in cognitive science? How do different levels of explanation fit together, or relate to one another? How should explanations at one level inform or constrain explanations at some other level? Can the different approaches to the mind, brain, and culture be unified? The aim of this issue of topiCS is to provide a platform for discussing different answers to such questions and to facilitate a better understanding between the different strands of thinking about the right levels of explanation in cognitive science.