Brain mechanisms underlying cue-based memorizing during free viewing of movie Memento

How does the human brain recall and connect relevant memories with unfolding events? To study this, we presented 25 healthy subjects, during functional magnetic resonance imaging, the movie 'Memento' (director C. Nolan). In this movie, scenes are presented in chronologically reverse order with certain scenes briefly overlapping previously presented scenes. Such overlapping "key-frames" serve as effective memory cues for the viewers, prompting recall of relevant memories of the previously seen scene and connecting them with the concurrent scene. We hypothesized that these repeating key-frames serve as immediate recall cues and would facilitate reconstruction of the story piece-by-piece. The chronological version of Memento, shown in a separate experiment for another group of subjects, served as a control condition. Using multivariate event-related pattern analysis method and representational similarity analysis, focal fingerprint patterns of hemodynamic activity were found to emerge during presentation of key-frame scenes. This effect was present in higher-order cortical network with regions including precuneus, angular gyrus, cingulate gyrus, as well as lateral, superior, and middle frontal gyri within frontal poles. This network was right hemispheric dominant. These distributed patterns of brain activity appear to underlie ability to recall relevant memories and connect them with ongoing events, i.e., "what goes with what" in a complex story. Given the real-life likeness of cinematic experience, these results provide new insight into how the human brain recalls, given proper cues, relevant memories to facilitate understanding and prediction of everyday life events.Peer reviewe

Integrating media content analysis, reception analysis, and media effects studies

Every day, the world of media is at our fingertips, whether it is watching movies, listening to the radio, or browsing online media. On average, people spend over 8 h per day consuming messages from the mass media, amounting to a total lifetime dose of more than 20 years in which conceptual content stimulates our brains. Effects from this flood of information range from short-term attention bursts (e.g., by breaking news features or viral ‘memes’) to life-long memories (e.g., of one’s favorite childhood movie), and from micro-level impacts on an individual’s memory, attitudes, and behaviors to macro-level effects on nations or generations. The modern study of media’s influence on society dates back to the 1940s. This body of mass communication scholarship has largely asked, “what is media’s effect on the individual?” Around the time of the cognitive revolution, media psychologists began to ask, “what cognitive processes are involved in media processing?” More recently, neuroimaging researchers started using real-life media as stimuli to examine perception and cognition under more natural conditions. Such research asks: “what can media tell us about brain function?” With some exceptions, these bodies of scholarship often talk past each other. An integration offers new insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms through which media affect single individuals and entire audiences. However, this endeavor faces the same challenges as all interdisciplinary approaches: Researchers with different backgrounds have different levels of expertise, goals, and foci. For instance, neuroimaging researchers label media stimuli as “naturalistic” although they are in many ways rather artificial. Similarly, media experts are typically unfamiliar with the brain. Neither media creators nor neuroscientifically oriented researchers approach media effects from a social scientific perspective, which is the domain of yet another species. In this article, we provide an overview of approaches and traditions to studying media, and we review the emerging literature that aims to connect these streams. We introduce an organizing scheme that connects the causal paths from media content → brain responses → media effects and discuss network control theory as a promising framework to integrate media content, reception, and effects analyses

Moral Understanding and Media: Meeting the Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research

Philosophers and other scholars have often claimed that the arts are not only cognitively valuable but also morally improving (e.g., Nussbaum, 1997). However, their arguments often proceed with little attention to empirical evidence. At the same time, filmmakers and media creators deliberately use devices to direct their audience’s attention, with the intention of impacting viewers’ cognitive, affective, and neurological responses in meaningful ways (Carroll & Seeley, 2013). Whether these devices have the desired effects, and on whom, also remains largely untested. If we want to understand the ways that film and media can have moral impacts, we must step out of our disciplinary siloes. It is not enough for film experts, philosophers, and experimentalists to merely take note of each other’s work; collaborative interdisciplinary research is required, both to improve methods and to examine questions that have not yet been empirically explored. In this article we propose a model for this kind of research, focusing on how media can influence moral understanding. We first outline the challenges that must be met for such research to be successful, including clarifying and operationalizing concepts, measuring moral understanding, and applying empirical methods to media and the arts. We then describe the advantages of interdisciplinary collaboration for meeting these challenges, in the context of some recent examples of interdisciplinary projects on related themes

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things 3/E

Among species, human beings seem to be a peculiar lot. Why is it, for example, that certain members of the species routinely put their survival at risk by puffing on a small stick of nicotine? Why is it that some females of the species make locomotion difficult for themselves by donning high-heel footwear? Are there hidden or unconscious reasons behind such strange behaviors that seem to be so utterly counter-instinctual, so to speak? For no manifest biological reason, humanity has always searched, and continues to search, for a purpose to its life. Is it this search that has led it to engage in such bizarre behaviors as smoking and wearing high heels? And is it the reason behind humanity’s invention of myths, art, rituals, languages, mathematics, science, and all the other truly remarkable things that set it apart from all other species? Clearly, Homo sapiens appears to be unique in the fact that many of its behaviors are shaped by forces other than the instincts. The discipline that endeavors to understand these forces is known as semiotics. Relatively unknown in comparison to, say, philosophy or psychology, semiotics probes the human condition in its own peculiar way, by unraveling the meanings of the signs that undergird not only the wearing of high-heel shoes, but also the construction of words, paintings, sculptures, and the like

The Philosophy of The X-Files

In The Philosophy of The X-Files, Dean A. Kowalski has gathered a remarkable cast of contributors to shed light on the philosophical mysteries of the television show The X-Files. With sections devoted to the show’s credos, such as “The Truth Is Out There,” individual characters, and specific episodes, The Philosophy of The X-Files illuminates the philosophical assumptions and presuppositions of the show as well as presents discussions through the show to help the reader better understand philosophy and philosophical inquiry. Dean A. Kowalski, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Waukesha, is the author of Classic Questions and Contemporary Film: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Philosophy of Steven Spielberg.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_popular_culture/1006/thumbnail.jp

The role of context in human memory augmentation

Technology has always had a direct impact on what humans remember. In the era of smartphones and wearable devices, people easily capture on a daily basis information and videos, which can help them remember past experiences and attained knowledge, or simply evoke memories for reminiscing. The increasing use of such ubiquitous devices and technologies produces a sheer volume of pictures and videos that, in combination with additional contextual information, could potentially significantly improve one’s ability to recall a past experience and prior knowledge. Calendar entries, application use logs, social media posts, and activity logs comprise only a few examples of such potentially memory-supportive additional information. This work explores how such memory-supportive information can be collected, filtered, and eventually utilized, for generating memory cues, fragments of past experience or prior knowledge, purposed for triggering one’s memory recall. In this thesis, we showcase how we leverage modern ubiquitous technologies as a vessel for transferring established psychological methods from the lab into the real world, for significantly and measurably augmenting human memory recall in a diverse set of often challenging contexts. We combine experimental evidence garnered from numerous field and lab studies, with knowledge amassed from an extensive literature review, for substantially informing the design and development of future pervasive memory augmentation systems. Ultimately, this work contributes to the fundamental understanding of human memory and how today’s modern technologies can be actuated for augmenting it

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Seria a reificação um erro filosófico? : um ensaio sobre sua cota desejável enquanto processo mental e implicações epistemológicas

Orientador: Profa. Dra. Helga Loos-Sant'AnaCoorientador: Prof. Dr. Rene Simonato Sant'Ana-LoosMonografia (graduação) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Ciências Biológicas, Curso de Graduação em Ciências BiológicasInclui referênciasResumo : Atribuído principalmente à linha sócio cultural e de análise crítica da sociologia, sua origem é obscura: traduções e reinterpretações, principalmente a partir da língua alemã, resultaram nas múltiplas definições de "reificação" na literatura. Nesse contexto, Stephen Jay Gould, em The Mismeasure of Man, descreve a reificação como "A propensão de converter um conceito abstrato (como a inteligência) em uma entidade real (como uma quantidade de matéria cerebral)" (GOULD, 1996, p. 27) ou ainda "a conversão de abstrações em entidades supostamente reais" (p. 48). No entanto, para o autor, a reificação seria um erro comum de tradições filosóficas, em conjunto com o reducionismo, a dicotomização e a hierarquização. Seria mesmo a reificação um erro filosófico? Inspirando-me neste conceito, neste manuscrito traço a ontogenia do termo ao abordar a reificação na literatura através de uma revisão sistemática. Com isso, pretendo abdicar das pré concepções da sociologia e alavancar a reificação como um processo mental análogo à simbolização (sensu Vygotsky), ainda que atuante na via inversa, /.e., do mundo simbólico para o mundo material, tentando identificar onde a reificação - um dos erros filosóficos que tendemos a cometer como humanos, segundoS. J. Gould - falhou, ou foi feita de maneira incompleta. Em outras palavras, pretendo reivindicar sua "cota desejável". Neste sentido, percebo que a reificação é uma amálgama de conceitos, mas como processo mental, pode ser acuradamente descrita como "imputação de abstrações no mundo concreto" na língua portuguesa, seguindo a definição de Gould. Também pretendo propor a reificação como uma exaptação ou coproduto do processo de simbolização, ainda que provavelmente ambos sejam dependentes do mesmo substrato neural. Posteriormente, trago a reificação frente a um tema da biologia evolutiva (e outros exemplos) e sua implicação epistemológica, especialmente no âmbito da cristalização de áreas e subáreas da ciência. Após reunir dezenas de definições de reificação, com o meta-estudo da revisão sistemática na base de dados ERIC, percebi que a reificação é abordada principalmente na matemática, e assim concluo que identificar como a reificação opera sobre nossas mentes se torna muitíssimo importante frente aos obstáculos na área da educação: uma vez reificado "corretamente", os conceitos permitem emergir inter-relações em diversas escalas, possibilitando o processo de ensino-aprendizagem. Ademais, concluo que a) o conceito de reificação como processo mental deve ser separado provisoriamente do conceito de reificação sociológico, sendo o último redefinido de acordo com sugestões anteriores na literatura e b) como processo mental, a reificação é campo produtivo para futuras investigações tanto da ciência empírica quanto da filosofia. Por fim, defendo a reificação não como um erro filosófico, mas sim um processo mental propenso a erro

THE ATTENTION SITUATION: A RHETORICAL THEORY OF ATTENTION FOR MEDIATED COMMUNICATION

What are the available means of attention in a given situation? This dissertation offers a hermeneutic for everyday life that capacitates people to answer this question. The field of communication has long recognized how new technologies challenge our assumptions about how attention operates and how they urge us to reformulate the language we use to think about attention. Rather than provide one attention vocabulary suited to one media environment, this project takes a generative approach that aims to continually refresh our notions about attention at the rate of technological change. To this end, I propose a way of talking about attention as a situational process that must be described pluralistically through a rotation of vocabularies. I offer the “attention situation” as a guiding framework for how interdisciplinary discourses can coherently converge upon any given situation. Then, I illustrate the attention situation framework through a distinctly rhetorical approach to theorizing attention. Paralleling the idea that rhetoric is an architectonic art, attention too is the architecting of material, symbolic, and intentional processes. I illustrate this through many examples from paradigmatic thinkers in media and rhetorical theory. The works of Marshall McLuhan and Kenneth Burke help exemplify how the attention situation can be used to highlight the communication-sourced aspects of attention. From these attention concepts, I formulate “dramatic ecology” as a paradigm of ways that attention is formed within larger socio-technological dialectics, which provides a finer language to assess communicative situations than that of science’s mechanistic behaviorisms. The attention situation, dramatic ecology, and the material-symbolic-intentional dimensions of attention together demonstrate how attention’s cross-disciplinary discourses can be adapted into situational praxis. This rhetorical approach to attention offers a generative toolkit for continually re-theorizing attention through the changes ahead in technology, society, and culture