Remembering as a mental action

Many philosophers consider that memory is just a passive information retention and retrieval capacity. Some information and experiences are encoded, stored, and subsequently retrieved in a passive way, without any control or intervention on the subject’s part. In this paper, we will defend an active account of memory according to which remembering is a mental action and not merely a passive mental event. According to the reconstructive account, memory is an imaginative reconstruction of past experience. A key feature of the reconstructive account is that given the imperfect character of memory outputs, some kind of control is needed. Metacognition is the control of mental processes and dispositions. Drawing from recent work on the normativity of automaticity and automatic control, we distinguish two kinds of metacognitive control: top-down, reflective control, on the one hand, and automatic, intuitive, feeling-based control on the other. Thus, we propose that whenever the mental process of remembering is controlled by means of intuitive or feeling-based metacognitive processes, it is an action

Psychotherapy with children and early adolescents from a mentalization perspective

Un faible nombre d’études portant spécifiquement sur des interventions basées sur la mentalisation pour les enfants et les adolescents sont actuellement disponibles. Cependant, plusieurs études appuient l’idée qu’un large éventail de psychopathologies sévères chez les enfants et les adolescents est lié à une faible capacité à mentaliser. Cette étude pilote vise donc à identifier, à classer et à conceptualiser les interventions fondées sur la mentalisation et utilisées en thérapie par deux thérapeutes expérimentés. Un enfant et un adolescent ont été suivis au cours de leur première année de psychothérapie afin d’obtenir des informations sur ce type d’interventions. Un total de vingt-huit séances de thérapie ont été sélectionnées et codifiées. Cet étude qualitative inductive/déductive a permis d'identifier vingt-trois techniques de mentalisation utilisées en thérapie. Sept techniques font référence à des catégories déjà préétablies alors que dix-sept techniques ont nouvellement émergé du processus de codification. Par ailleurs, un cadre conceptuel a été élaboré afin d’organiser de manière cohérente toutes les interventions basées sur la mentalisation. Une des principales contributions de cette étude pilote fut l’identification et la description de sept nouvelles techniques ayant émergé de la codification et qui sont utilisées dans la thérapie par le jeu. Nos résultats ont montré que dans cette forme de thérapie, le thérapeute utilise un vaste répertoire d'interventions basées sur la mentalisation. En somme, cette étude vise à enrichir le cadre théorique et pratique des traitements basés sur la mentalisation chez les enfants et les adolescents avec des nouvelles données empiriques.Little has been written about mentalization based interventions in adolescents and children in clinical settings. However, several studies have found that a significant number of the most severe child and adolescent pathologies are related with an inadequate capacity to mentalize. The present pilot study, aimed to identify, categorize and conceptualize the mentalization-based interventions used by two experienced therapists. One child and one adolescent were followed up during the first year of psychotherapy to obtain this explicit information. A total of twenty eight therapy session were selected and coded. This qualitative, inductive/deductive study identified twenty four mentalization based techniques used during therapy. Seven techniques were pre-established categories, and seventeen new techniques emerged from the coding process. In addition, based on the coding process, a conceptual framework was developed and used to coherently organize all observed mentalization based interventions. One of the major findings of this pilot study were eight emerging techniques which described mentalization based interventions used in play therapy. Even though little literature is currently available on this subject, our findings have shown that in play therapy our therapist utilized an extensive range of mentalization based interventions. This study is an important step, since it contributes to enrich the theoretical and practical MBT framework for children and adolescents, with new empirical based evidence

Collaborative Appearance-Based Place Recognition and Improving Place Recognition Using Detection of Dynamic Objects

This dissertation makes contributions to the problem of Long-Term Appearance-Based Place Recognition. We present a framework for place recognition in a collaborative scheme and a method to reduce the impact of dynamic objects on place representations. We demonstrate our findings using a state-of-the-art place recognition approach. We begin in Part I by describing the general problem of place recognition and its importance in applications where accurate localization is crucial. We discuss feature detection and description and also explain the functioning of several place recognition frameworks. In Part II, we present a novel framework for collaboration between agents from a pure appearance-based place recognition perspective. Using this framework, multiple agents can efficiently share partial or complete knowledge about places and benefit from their teamwork. This collaborative framework allows agents with limited storage and memory capacity to become useful in environment exploration tasks (for instance, by enabling remote recognition); includes procedures to manage an agent’s memory load and distributes knowledge of places across agents; allows the reuse of knowledge from one agent to another; and increases the tolerance for failure of individual agents. Part II also defines metrics which allow us to measure the performance of a system that uses the collaborative framework. Finally, in Part III, we present an innovative method to improve the recognition of places in environments densely populated by dynamic objects. We demonstrate that we can improve the recognition performance in these environments by incorporating high- level information from dynamic objects. Tests conducted using a synthetic dataset show the benefits of our approach. The proposed method allows the system to significantly improve the recognition performance in the photo-realistic dataset while reducing storage requirements, resulting in up to 23.7 percent less storage space than the state-of-the-art approach that we have extended; smaller representations also reduced the time required to match places. In Part III, we also formulate the concept of a valid place representation and determine the quality of the observation based on dynamic objects present in the agent’s view. Of course, recognition systems that are sensitive to dynamic objects incur additional computational costs to recognize those objects. We show that this additional cost is outweighed by the benefits that incorporating dynamic object detection in the place recognition pipeline. Our findings can be used in many applications, including applications for navigation, e.g. assisting visually impaired individuals with navigating indoors, or autonomous vehicles

Relational Galois connections between transitive fuzzy digraphs

Fuzzy-directed graphs are often chosen as the data structure to model and implement solutions to several problems in the applied sciences. Galois connections have also shown to be useful both in theoretical and in practical problems. In this paper, the notion of relational Galois connection is extended to be applied between transitive fuzzy directed graphs. In this framework, the components of the connection are crisp relations satisfying certain reasonable properties given in terms of the so-called full powering

Packs, troops and herds: Prosocial cooperatives and innovation in the new normal

Prosocial organizations are emerging to tackle the effects of a New Normal. As they navigate its fragile and liquid institutional membranes, they prioritize cooperative forms of governance. These forms allow for collaboration and democratic decision‐making necessary for the development of innovative solutions in this new context. At the same time, the high coordination costs of cooperatives lead to significant market pressures. Therefore, understanding when and under what conditions these new cooperatives innovate and strive is important as it provides insight into whether and how these ventures can become a viable alternative in this changing landscape. Using configurational analyses of organizational enablers leading to innovation in 40 entrepreneurial cooperatives, we identify three approaches: Attentive Pack, Eclectic Troop, and Wandering Herd, showing that innovative outcomes can indeed emerge under traditional cooperative features emphasizing collectivism. However, the pursuit of higher novelty requires a shift to more individualistic, business‐as‐usual, approaches. The New Normal does indeed enhance entrepreneurial activity, but of a different kind comprising novel sets of antecedents and outcomes, which we show can easily become the new dominant form of venturing required in this new context

Automated Network Service Scaling in NFV: Concepts, Mechanisms and Scaling Workflow

Next-generation systems are anticipated to be digital platforms supporting innovative services with rapidly changing traffic patterns. To cope with this dynamicity in a cost-efficient manner, operators need advanced service management capabilities such as those provided by NFV. NFV enables operators to scale network services with higher granularity and agility than today. For this end, automation is key. In search of this automation, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has defined a reference NFV framework that make use of model-driven templates called Network Service Descriptors (NSDs) to operate network services through their lifecycle. For the scaling operation, an NSD defines a discrete set of instantiation levels among which a network service instance can be resized throughout its lifecycle. Thus, the design of these levels is key for ensuring an effective scaling. In this article, we provide an overview of the automation of the network service scaling operation in NFV, addressing the options and boundaries introduced by ETSI normative specifications. We start by providing a description of the NSD structure, focusing on how instantiation levels are constructed. For illustrative purposes, we propose an NSD for a representative NS. This NSD includes different instantiation levels that enable different ways to automatically scale this NS. Then, we show the different scaling procedures the NFV framework has available, and how it may automate their triggering. Finally, we propose an ETSI-compliant workflow to describe in detail a representative scaling procedure. This workflow clarifies the interactions and information exchanges between the functional blocks in the NFV framework when performing the scaling operation.Comment: This work has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Communications Magazin