14 research outputs found

    Decoding Neural Activity to Assess Individual Latent State in Ecologically Valid Contexts

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    There exist very few ways to isolate cognitive processes, historically defined via highly controlled laboratory studies, in more ecologically valid contexts. Specifically, it remains unclear as to what extent patterns of neural activity observed under such constraints actually manifest outside the laboratory in a manner that can be used to make an accurate inference about the latent state, associated cognitive process, or proximal behavior of the individual. Improving our understanding of when and how specific patterns of neural activity manifest in ecologically valid scenarios would provide validation for laboratory-based approaches that study similar neural phenomena in isolation and meaningful insight into the latent states that occur during complex tasks. We argue that domain generalization methods from the brain-computer interface community have the potential to address this challenge. We previously used such an approach to decode phasic neural responses associated with visual target discrimination. Here, we extend that work to more tonic phenomena such as internal latent states. We use data from two highly controlled laboratory paradigms to train two separate domain-generalized models. We apply the trained models to an ecologically valid paradigm in which participants performed multiple, concurrent driving-related tasks. Using the pretrained models, we derive estimates of the underlying latent state and associated patterns of neural activity. Importantly, as the patterns of neural activity change along the axis defined by the original training data, we find changes in behavior and task performance consistent with the observations from the original, laboratory paradigms. We argue that these results lend ecological validity to those experimental designs and provide a methodology for understanding the relationship between observed neural activity and behavior during complex tasks

    The Multistable Material of Modernism: Perception, Objects, and Identity

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    This dissertation argues that modernist writers channeled the transformative potential of multistability, a popular concept among twentieth-century theorists of perception, into politically charged literary practices whose goals continue to reverberate in recent antiracist and decolonial theory. In the first half of the twentieth century, psychologists used the concept of multistability to explain human perception and captured this concept in paradoxical images that appear first as one thing and then another, through a shift in what the viewer perceives as figure and ground. Writers as different as H.D., Virginia Woolf, Amos Tutuola, and Wilson Harris adapted multistability into literary practices that sought to dismantle the bounds of patriarchal, imperialist, and anthropocentric hierarchies. These writers infused their representations of perception, objects, and power dynamics with a multistability that ceaselessly troubles the divide between subject and object and its related structures of social exploitation. Moreover, placing these writers’ efforts to expand what counts as a subject or agent alongside recent theories of extrahuman ontologies that seek empowering alternatives to the exclusions of Western subjectivity offers a compelling link between modernist literary experiment and contemporary antiracist and decolonial theory concerning objects, identity, and ecology

    Front-Line Physicians' Satisfaction with Information Systems in Hospitals

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    Day-to-day operations management in hospital units is difficult due to continuously varying situations, several actors involved and a vast number of information systems in use. The aim of this study was to describe front-line physicians' satisfaction with existing information systems needed to support the day-to-day operations management in hospitals. A cross-sectional survey was used and data chosen with stratified random sampling were collected in nine hospitals. Data were analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The response rate was 65 % (n = 111). The physicians reported that information systems support their decision making to some extent, but they do not improve access to information nor are they tailored for physicians. The respondents also reported that they need to use several information systems to support decision making and that they would prefer one information system to access important information. Improved information access would better support physicians' decision making and has the potential to improve the quality of decisions and speed up the decision making process.Peer reviewe

    Content and Psychology

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    The theoretical underpinnings and practical worth of content-based, intentional, or "folk" psychology have been challenged by three distinct groups of philosophical critics in the past 15 years or so. The first group, comprised by Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge, and other advocates of "wide" or "externalist" theories of meaning, claims that traditional psychologists have been mistaken in assuming that our beliefs, desires, and other content-laden states supervene on or inhere in our individual minds or brains. The other two groups are both "eliminative materialists," who charge that the intentional approach is inadequate and that it can or will be replaced by a completely non-interpretive discipline: either neuropsychology, in the view of Patricia and Paul Churchland, or a strictly syntactic computational psychology, according to Stephen Stich. ;This dissertation defends "notional world" or narrow intentional psychology against these charges, primarily on the strength of its practical merits, in contrast to the limitations and adverse effects of the proposed alternatives. Psychology is at least partly an applied science with a mandate to help understand and treat concrete psychological problems such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression, I argue, so any theorist who proposes to reconfigure or phase out existing approaches must be prepared to take over these duties with at least equal facility. However, whereas various "narrow" schools of psychotherapy such as Cognitive Therapy are fairly successful in this regard and show every indication of continuing to be needed for the foreseeable future, the Syntactic Theory seems to show very poor promise of being able to help relieve the distress of people with psychological disturbances, while a purely neurobiological approach is inappropriate in many cases, and tends to cause a variety of untoward and dangerous side-effects. As for the "wide" theorists with their emphasis upon the social and environmental contributions to meaning: they must acknowledge that a good deal of content is in the head; and, more importantly, by focusing on the role of the "experts" in a society's language-game, they miss the whole point of a psychological attribution, which is to understand an individual's reasons--however idiosyncratic--for acting as he or she does

    Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

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    Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

    Literary transmissions and the fate of a topic: the continental spa in post-1840 British, Russian and American writing

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    Around 1840 the Continental watering place took off as a destination of international appeal—and as a topic in an internationalizing print culture. My thesis, drawing on a broad range of theories of intertextuality, uses the case of the waters to model the farrago of transmissions, contacts and collisions that go into the making of a common-place in discourse. In particular I show how writing from multiple genres and national literatures helped establish the spa's identity as a deeply ambivalent locus of encounter—a venue that both tickled and deflated cosmopolitan ambition. Key points of reference include Dostoevskii'sThe Gambler, Edmund Yates's sensation novel Black Sheep (both 1867) and Henry James's spa fiction (‘Eugene Pickering’, Roderick Hudson and Confidence)—but also Punch and the Russian satirical journal The Alarm Clock (Budilk’nik), the travel writing of Joel Tyler Headley and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Murray's Handbook for Travellers on the Continent. The elaboration of a topic is above all an exercise in collective (if not concerted) sign-making; and like any potent sign, I suggest with reference to temporally outlying works of resort fiction by Bruce Chatwin, Mikhail Tsypkin and W.G. Sebald, the nineteenth century's 'watering-place text' stubbornly refuses confinement to the age that produced it

    Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Book

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    Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Boo

    Handa sa laban araw-araw? (Ready to fight every day?) : Readiness to Political Action and Sense of Entitlement: How strong is Citizenship in the Philippines? With a Special Focus on International Call Center Agents

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    The aim of this dissertation is to identity the sense of citizenship prevalent in the Philippines. Citizenship here is defined in two respects: an active dimension (exercis-ing voice) and a passive dimension (claiming rights or sense of entitlement). Findings from a series of problem-centered interviews with call center agents are complemented by the outcome of several annual surveys by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), especially the ISSP surveys on government (2006), social inequality (2009) and citizenship (2004) and validated by the analysis of media col-umns and societal artefacts over the last 10 years. While the first part of the dissertation analyzes why trade unions and other forms of collective interest representation hardly develop in the call center setting (economic citizenship), the second part identifies readiness to political action and expectations towards the state (political citizenship) in the context of an “informal security re-gime” (Geoff Wood). The main part of the study is followed by a postscript offering an outlook on opportunities and limitations of citizenship in the Philippine social and cultural context. The work contains several theoretical discussions of basic concepts and issues arising when sense of citizenship, especially in a non-European context, is analyzed. These include critiques on the theory of citizenship and on precarity, the middle class(es), citizenship in a non-western context, spaces of the political and post-national citizen-ship. In sum, a sense of citizenship is identified as full of requirements so that the stand-by citizen is rather considered the norm. The work comes to the conclusion that there is no general lack of a sense of citizen-ship among Filipinos. However as they have never experienced a comprehensive public service and consider such “unrealistic,” their expectations as citizens are in practice low. The state is considered as enabler, not as provider, so that self-help is given priority. Such rather communitarian sense of citizenship is identified as con-niving with a neoliberal governementality of responsibilization. Only among those with a left political socialization can a sense of citizenship, as assumed in most schol-arly literature, be identified, with substantial expectations towards the state, demand of accountability and an identity as political subject (professional citizenship)
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