Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events

“Episodes” in memory are formed by the experience of dynamic events that unfold over time. However, just because a series of events unfold sequentially does not mean that they are related. Sequences can have a high degree of causal coherence, each event connecting to the next through a cause-and-effect relationship, or be a fragmented series of unrelated occurrences. Are causally coherent events remembered better? And if coherence leads to better recall, which attributes of episodic memories are particularly affected by it? Past work has investigated similar questions by manipulating the causal structure of language-based, narrative stimuli. In this study, across three experiments, we used dynamic visual stimuli showing unfamiliar events to test the effect of causal structure on episodic recall in a cued memory task. Experiment 1 found that the order of three-part causally coherent sequences of events is better remembered than that of fragmented events. Experiment 2 extended this finding to longer sequences and further demonstrated that causal structure is not confounded with low-level characteristics of the stimuli: Reversing the order of coherent stimuli led to task performances indistinguishable from those on fragmented stimuli. Experiment 3 replicated the results of improved order recall from the previous experiments and additionally showed that recall of causally relevant details of coherent stimuli is superior to recall for details of focal events in fragmented sequences. In sum, these findings show that the episodic memory system is sensitive to the causal structure of events and suggest coherence usually leads to better recall

Spatio-temporal visual statistical learning in context

Visual Statistical Learning (VSL) is classically investigated in a restricted format, either as temporal or spatial VSL, and void of any effect or bias due to context. However, in real-world environments, spatial patterns unfold over time, leading to a fundamental intertwining between spatial and temporal regularities. In addition, their interpretation is heavily influenced by contextual information through internal biases encoded at different scales. Using a novel spatio-temporal VSL setup, we explored this interdependence between time, space, and biases by moving spatially defined patterns in and out of participants' views over time in the presence or absence of occluders. First, we replicated the classical VSL results in such a mixed setup. Next, we obtained evidence that purely temporal statistics can be used for learning spatial patterns through internal inference. Finally, we found that motion-defined and occlusion-related context jointly and strongly modulated which temporal and spatial regularities were automatically learned from the same visual input. Overall, our findings expand the conceptualization of VSL from a mechanistic recorder of low-level spatial and temporal co-occurrence statistics of single visual elements to a complex interpretive process that integrates low-level spatio-temporal information with higher-level internal biases to infer the general underlying structure of the environment

Glossa Psycholinguistics

Prediction, both on the syntactic and the semantic level, is a central process in language comprehension. For instance, people predict aspects of event structure based on morphosyntactic markers on verbs: hearing has peeled directs one's attention towards a culminated event, as opposed to an ongoing event. Here, we ask how general this prediction process is, and specifically, whether it extends to cues outside the predicate, using the Hindi split-ergative system as case study. Ergativity allows properties of an event to be predicted on the subject, notably a constituent outside the Verb Phrase. In four studies, we map out the role subject marking plays for prediction of event properties in comprehension. Our results show that in some offline judgments, ergativity is a strong predictor of culminated events; but the cue provided by ergative marking is not taken into account during incremental comprehension, questioning accounts of automatically triggered culmination inferences in ergative constructions as well as providing evidence for a limit of predictive processing

Political Participation and Voice Across MENA Countries

This study explores how informal employment, prevalent across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, impacts political behavior by creating insider–outsider divides. While previous research offers mixed evidence on the relationship between informal employment, voting patterns, and social policy preferences, our analysis reveals a significant and robust negative association between informality and various forms of political mobilization, including petitioning, protesting, and the use of force for political causes. Informal sector workers are less likely to engage politically due to limited resources, organizational constraints, and diminished incentives within exclusionary economic and political systems. Importantly, our findings show that this inverse relationship persists regardless of democratic context, although social assistance programs can partially mediate the effects of informality on political engagement. Our findings emphasize the importance of structural barriers in fostering inclusive political participation and expand the literature on the relationship between labor markets, social policy, and democratization in Global South

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

There is extensive, yet fragmented, evidence of gender differences in academia suggesting that women are underrepresented in most scientific disciplines and publish fewer articles throughout a career, and their work acquires fewer citations. Here, we offer a comprehensive picture of longitudinal gender differences in performance through a bibliometric analysis of academic publishing careers by reconstructing the complete publication history of over 1.5 million gender-identified authors whose publishing career ended between 1955 and 2010, covering 83 countries and 13 disciplines. We find that, paradoxically, the increase of participation of women in science over the past 60 years was accompanied by an increase of gender differences in both productivity and impact. Most surprisingly, though, we uncover two gender invariants, finding that men and women publish at a comparable annual rate and have equivalent career-wise impact for the same size body of work. Finally, we demonstrate that differences in publishing career lengths and dropout rates explain a large portion of the reported career-wise differences in productivity and impact, although productivity differences still remain. This comprehensive picture of gender inequality in academia can help rephrase the conversation around the sustainability of women's careers in academia, with important consequences for institutions and policy makers

Kontingenz und Krise - Institutionenpolitik in kapitalistischen und postsozialistischen Gesellschaften - Claus Offe zu seinem 60. Geburstag.

State capacity to resist powerful predatory economic groups is highly dependent on the way social diversity is represented within the polity. Such state capacity is weak when a single branch of government can usurp the representation of public good between two elections. ln some democracies that I call heterarchies, coalition partners, parties in different houses of the legislature, different levels and branches of government, autonomous state agencies compel executives to take into account diverse modes of representation while making their programs and policies. Such constraints on executive authority allow the state to rise above the direct distribution of powers and interests within the economy. ln the paper I use the Russian case to analyze the relationship between state weakness and the related problems of economic development