Cavendish Square and Spencer House: Neo-classicism, opportunity and nostalgia

The Society of Dilettanti planned a temple-fronted academy of arts on the north side of Cavendish Square in the early 1750s. It can now be shown that stone bought and cut for this building was used in the Green Park elevation of Spencer House (1756–9), shedding new light on design there. The Cavendish Square site stayed empty until speculative pairs of houses were built in 1768–70. Their temple-fronted stone façades, hitherto explained as incorporating stone from the 1750s, must now be understood not as the result of salvage, but as a conscious echo of the abandoned academy project

Vernacular Revival and Ideology - What's Left?

This essay derives from a lecture first given at a Vernacular Architecture Group conference on vernacular revivals in 2015, reprised to generally younger audiences at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the University of Westminster. Its retrospection about vernacular architecture, anonymity, revival and left-wing ideologies was prompted primarily by a bemused awareness of recent advances in self-building. It seemed timely to try to get at how and why certain ideas retain traction. Then, coincidentally, young and old were recombining behind Jeremy Corbyn to reinvigorate Labour, and the self-styled design ‘collective’ Assemble won the Turner Prize. John Ruskin, William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement and Romanticism arise (how could they not?), but only in passing, for a revisionist view of what has come since. It is taken as read that a strong commitment to architectural design as being rooted in labour and everyday or subaltern agency tallied with the emergence of socialism and was an important part of architectural thinking and history in late-19th-century England. This is an attempt to relate that history to the present in a new overview for a new framework. It adopts an unconventional or purist definition of what vernacular means that will clash with many preconceptions

The Survey of London's approaches to the history of East London

The Survey of London began in East London in the 1890s. Its founder Charles Robert Ashbee had a strong socialist commitment to the advancement of equality through understandings of a common built environment. The Survey’s first monograph, subtitled an ‘Object Lesson in National History’, was devoted to Trinity Hospital, almshouses on the Mile End Road. It interwove architectural and social history in a preservation campaign that emphasised the social value of historic buildings. In 1910 the Survey was taken under the wing of the London County Council (LCC) where its purposes knitted well with the dominant Progressive party’s determination to raise historical consciousness as a counter to the interests of private property. After the Second World War the LCC took the Survey back to its roots to re-engage with development and destruction. An early fruit of this was a volume devoted to Spitalfields (volume 27, 1957). Not only did this bring attention to the district’s previously uncelebrated eighteenthcentury houses, but it also broadened to account for humble and recent buildings, even those of the inter-war period. In 2016 the Survey once again returned to East London, to work towards publication on Whitechapel, a place currently witnessing huge change. An innovation for the Survey is an interactive map-based website (‘Survey of London – histories of Whitechapel’ http://surveyoflondon.org). This allows the public to contribute knowledge, memories and images to research on the area, a melding of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ history that takes the Survey onto new methodological ground. It is also a reaffirmation of Ashbee’s original mission

Speculative development and the origins and history of East India Company settlement in Cavendish Square and Harley Street

As London grew north and west in the eighteenth century, wealth settled on the new-built streets of the Cavendish-Harley (later Portland, now Howard de Walden) estate. This paper describes how, why and where individuals enriched through the East India Company came to ground in this part of London. The cases of Francis Shepheard, scion of an important company family, Governor Robert Adams, in flight from Tellicherry, his nephew Robert Orme, the historian of India, General Richard Smith, a notorious ‘Nabob’, and a few others elucidate the market-based origins and accidental then deliberate consolidation of this settlement and stand for many more East India Company names about whom at this point less is known

Exploring the Event-Related Potentials' Time Course of Associative Recognition in Autism

Behavioral data on episodic recollection in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) point limited relational memory functioning. However, the involvement of successive memory processes in the profile of episodic memory in ASD needs more study. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate the time course of episodic recollection with an associative recognition paradigm with picture pairs. Twenty-two participants with ASD and 32 with typical development (TD), all right-handed, were included. Behavioral results confirmed difficulties in correctly recognizing identical pairs in the ASD relative to TD group. We found an unexpected amplitude decrement on the P2 (220-270 msec) and FN400 (350-470 msec) potentials, suggesting diminished priming and familiarity effects in the ASD relative to TD group. However, ERP data revealed that the recognition of associative information relies on the same electrophysiological process (old/new effect in the 600-700-msec late positive component) in ASD participants as in TD ones, with a parietal extension in the ASD group. These results suggest that the electrophysiological processes of associative recognition are qualitatively similar in individuals with and without ASD but may differ quantitatively. This difference may be driven by the reduced early processing of picture pairs that may in turn lead to their diminished integration into the semantic memory system, being partially compensated by a greater involvement of associative memory during the recollection process. Other studies would be useful to go further in identifying these cognitive processes involved in atypical recognition in ASD and their neural substrates. LAY SUMMARY: We identified diminished performance on the associative recognition of picture pairs in adolescents and young adults with autism when compared to typical development. Electrophysiological data revealed qualitative similarities but quantitative differences between-group, with diminished priming and familiarity processes partially compensated by an enhanced parietal recollection process

Short-term memory span and cross-modality integration in younger and older adults with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

This study tested whether adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show the same pattern of difficulties and absence of age-related differences in short-term memory (STM) as those that have been reported in episodic long-term memory (LTM). Fifty-three adults with ASD (age range: 25-65 years) were compared to 52 age-, biological sex- and intelligence-matched typically developing (TD; age range: 21-67 years) adults on three short-term memory span tasks, which tested STM performance for letters (Verbal), grid locations (Visuospatial) or letters in grid-locations (Multimodal). A sub-sample of 34 TD and 33 ASD participants ranging in age from 25-64 years completed a fourth multimodal Integration task. We also administered the Color Trails Test as a measure of executive function. ASD participants’ accuracy was lower than that of the TD participants on the three span tasks (Cohen’s d: 0.26 to 0.50). The Integration task difference was marginally significant (p = .07) but had a moderate effect size (Cohen’s d = 0.50). Regression analyses confirmed reduced STM performance only for older TD participants. Analyses also indicated that executive processes played a greater role in the ASD group’s performance. The demonstration of similar difficulties and age-related patterning of STM in ASD to those documented for LTM and the greater recruitment of executive processes by older ASD participants on the Integration task suggest a compensatory role of frontal processes both as a means of achieving undiminished task performance and as a possible protection against older age cognitive decline in ASD. Longitudinal research is needed to confirm this

Parallel Driving and Modulatory Pathways Link the Prefrontal Cortex and Thalamus

Pathways linking the thalamus and cortex mediate our daily shifts from states of attention to quiet rest, or sleep, yet little is known about their architecture in high-order neural systems associated with cognition, emotion and action. We provide novel evidence for neurochemical and synaptic specificity of two complementary circuits linking one such system, the prefrontal cortex with the ventral anterior thalamic nucleus in primates. One circuit originated from the neurochemical group of parvalbumin-positive thalamic neurons and projected focally through large terminals to the middle cortical layers, resembling ‘drivers’ in sensory pathways. Parvalbumin thalamic neurons, in turn, were innervated by small ‘modulatory’ type cortical terminals, forming asymmetric (presumed excitatory) synapses at thalamic sites enriched with the specialized metabotropic glutamate receptors. A second circuit had a complementary organization: it originated from the neurochemical group of calbindin-positive thalamic neurons and terminated through small ‘modulatory’ terminals over long distances in the superficial prefrontal layers. Calbindin thalamic neurons, in turn, were innervated by prefrontal axons through small and large terminals that formed asymmetric synapses preferentially at sites with ionotropic glutamate receptors, consistent with a driving pathway. The largely parallel thalamo-cortical pathways terminated among distinct and laminar-specific neurochemical classes of inhibitory neurons that differ markedly in inhibitory control. The balance of activation of these parallel circuits that link a high-order association cortex with the thalamus may allow shifts to different states of consciousness, in processes that are disrupted in psychiatric diseases

Towards a Mathematical Theory of Cortical Micro-circuits

The theoretical setting of hierarchical Bayesian inference is gaining acceptance as a framework for understanding cortical computation. In this paper, we describe how Bayesian belief propagation in a spatio-temporal hierarchical model, called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), can lead to a mathematical model for cortical circuits. An HTM node is abstracted using a coincidence detector and a mixture of Markov chains. Bayesian belief propagation equations for such an HTM node define a set of functional constraints for a neuronal implementation. Anatomical data provide a contrasting set of organizational constraints. The combination of these two constraints suggests a theoretically derived interpretation for many anatomical and physiological features and predicts several others. We describe the pattern recognition capabilities of HTM networks and demonstrate the application of the derived circuits for modeling the subjective contour effect. We also discuss how the theory and the circuit can be extended to explain cortical features that are not explained by the current model and describe testable predictions that can be derived from the model