Rethinking egocentric bias: a computer mouse tracking study of adult belief processing

Several theories of belief processing assume that processing another’s false belief requires overcoming an egocentric bias toward one’s current knowledge. The current evidence in support of this claim, however, is limited. In order to investigate the presence of egocentric bias in adult belief processing, computer mouse tracking was used across three experiments to measure attraction toward response options reflecting one’s current knowledge while reporting a false belief. Participants viewed scenarios in which an agent either had a true belief or a false belief about the location of a set of keys. Participants used a mouse to answer reality questions “where are the keys currently hidden?” and belief questions “where does she think the keys are?” Mouse-tracking measures indexing attraction toward response options during decision making were measured, along with time taken to make a response and accuracy. Experiment 1 found no evidence, in any measures, that participants showed a bias toward their own knowledge when reporting another’s false belief. Experiment 2 investigated whether differences in event timings between true belief and false belief scenarios in Experiment 1 masked an egocentric bias. Experiment 3 investigated whether the lack of egocentric bias could be explained by participants prioritizing encoding the other’s beliefs. Neither follow-up experiment found evidence supporting the presence of an egocentric bias. Overall, contrary to many theories of belief processing, our results suggest that adults are readily able to process other people’s beliefs without having to overcome a default bias toward their own knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved

Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence

[Excerpt] Anthropologies of Unemployment offers accessible, theoretically innovative, and ethnographically rich examinations of unemployment in rural and urban regions across North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The diversity of case studies demonstrates that unemployment is a pressing global phenomenon that sheds light on the uneven consequences of free-market ideologies and policies. Economic, social, and cultural marginalization is common in the lives of the unemployed, but their experience and interpretation are shaped by local and national cultural particularities. In exploring those differences, the contributors to this volume employ recent theoretical innovations and engage with some of the more salient topics in contemporary anthropology, such as globalization, migration, youth cultures, bureaucracy, class, gender, and race. Taken together, the chapters reveal that there is something new about unemployment today. It is not a temporary occurrence, but a chronic condition. In adjusting to persistent, longstanding unemployment, people and groups create new understandings of unemployment as well as of work and employment; they improvise new forms of sociality, morality, and personhood. Ethnographic studies such as those found in Anthropologies of Unemployment are crucial if we are to understand the broader forms, meanings, and significance of pervasive economic insecurity and discover the emergence of new social and cultural possibilities

Scattered Governance: A Typology for Toronto’s Business Improvement Areas

Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) - or Business Improvement Districts as they are known in the United States - are self-taxing local bodies that play an important role in urban governance. Toronto, which was the location of the first BIA in the world, has one of the highest number of BIAs in North America, yet little is known about how these bodies differ across the city. Using a mixed methodological approach that includes geographic information systems mapping, quantitative analysis, and semi-structured interview data, this chapter addresses this gap in knowledge by offering a typology of Toronto BIAs, looking at the metrics of size, walkability/transit score, budgets, and year of formation. The study concludes that there are four kinds of BIAs in Toronto scattered unevenly across the city: Big City Builders, Old Local Stewards, Big Industrial Powerhouses, and Emerging Small Centres. The paper sets out the unique attributes of each kind of BIA, some preliminary conclusions as to how Toronto’s BIA types differ from those in other jurisdictions, and points at the explosive creation of Emerging Small Centres BIAs following Toronto\u27s amalgamation

A cognitive ego-vision system for interactive assistance

With increasing computational power and decreasing size, computers nowadays are already wearable and mobile. They become attendant of peoples' everyday life. Personal digital assistants and mobile phones equipped with adequate software gain a lot of interest in public, although the functionality they provide in terms of assistance is little more than a mobile databases for appointments, addresses, to-do lists and photos. Compared to the assistance a human can provide, such systems are hardly to call real assistants. The motivation to construct more human-like assistance systems that develop a certain level of cognitive capabilities leads to the exploration of two central paradigms in this work. The first paradigm is termed cognitive vision systems. Such systems take human cognition as a design principle of underlying concepts and develop learning and adaptation capabilities to be more flexible in their application. They are embodied, active, and situated. Second, the ego-vision paradigm is introduced as a very tight interaction scheme between a user and a computer system that especially eases close collaboration and assistance between these two. Ego-vision systems (EVS) take a user's (visual) perspective and integrate the human in the system's processing loop by means of a shared perception and augmented reality. EVSs adopt techniques of cognitive vision to identify objects, interpret actions, and understand the user's visual perception. And they articulate their knowledge and interpretation by means of augmentations of the user's own view. These two paradigms are studied as rather general concepts, but always with the goal in mind to realize more flexible assistance systems that closely collaborate with its users. This work provides three major contributions. First, a definition and explanation of ego-vision as a novel paradigm is given. Benefits and challenges of this paradigm are discussed as well. Second, a configuration of different approaches that permit an ego-vision system to perceive its environment and its user is presented in terms of object and action recognition, head gesture recognition, and mosaicing. These account for the specific challenges identified for ego-vision systems, whose perception capabilities are based on wearable sensors only. Finally, a visual active memory (VAM) is introduced as a flexible conceptual architecture for cognitive vision systems in general, and for assistance systems in particular. It adopts principles of human cognition to develop a representation for information stored in this memory. So-called memory processes continuously analyze, modify, and extend the content of this VAM. The functionality of the integrated system emerges from their coordinated interplay of these memory processes. An integrated assistance system applying the approaches and concepts outlined before is implemented on the basis of the visual active memory. The system architecture is discussed and some exemplary processing paths in this system are presented and discussed. It assists users in object manipulation tasks and has reached a maturity level that allows to conduct user studies. Quantitative results of different integrated memory processes are as well presented as an assessment of the interactive system by means of these user studies