Observations on the relationship between verbal explicit and implicit memory and neuronal density in the left and right hippocampus in temporal lobectomy patients.

The relationship between neuronal density and verbal memory in left and right hippocampal subfields was investigated in patients who underwent surgery for alleviation of temporal lobe epilepsy. The surgery consisted of unilateral partial removal of the hippocampus along with the anterior temporal lobe and amygdala. Study 1 looked at post-surgical explicit versus implicit verbal memory for lists of words while Study 2 looked at pre- and post-surgical explicit memory for word pairs. Left subfield CA1 appeared to be the most consistently involved in explicit and implicit memory. The results of the two studies confirm presence of hemispheric asymmetry in verbal memory. The notion that hippocampal control of memory is most apparent in post-surgical performance is discussed

Exploring the relationship between spatial cognitive ability and movement ecology

Spatial cognitive ability is hypothesised to be a key determinant of animal movement patterns. However, empirical demonstrations linking intra-individual variations in spatial cognitive ability with movement ecology are rare. I reared ~200 simultaneously hatched pheasant chicks per year over three years in standardised conditions without parents, controlling for the confounding effects of experience, maternal influences and age. I tested the chicks on spatial cognitive tasks from three weeks old to obtain measures of inherent, early-life spatial cognitive ability. Each year, I released birds when 10 weeks old into an open-topped enclosure in woodland. Birds dispersed from this enclosure after about one-month. Importantly, all birds were released into the same, novel area simultaneously, thus their experiences and opportunities were standardised. I remotely tracked pheasant movement through either RFID antenna placed under 43 supplementary feeders situated throughout our field site (2016) or by using a novel reverse-GPS tracking system (2017-2018). Spatial cognitive ability, determined through binary spatial discrimination (2016) or a Barnes maze (2017), was related to the diversity of foraging sites an individual used (Chapter 2: 2016). Those with better spatial cognitive ability used a more diverse range of artificial feeders than poor performing counterparts, perhaps to retain a buffer of alternative foraging sites where resource profitability was known. I found no relationship between the timing of daily foraging onset between birds of differing cognitive ability (Chapter 3; 2016), which I had hypothesised to be a consequence of birds developing efficient routes between refuges and feeders. After establishing a reverse GPS system on our field site (Chapter 4: 2017), I collected more detailed information about pheasant movement and found that birds with higher accuracy scores on the cognition tasks initially moved between foraging and resting sites more slowly than inaccurate birds in novel environments, perhaps to gather more detailed information. Accurate birds increased their speed over one month to match the same speed as inaccurate birds. All birds increased the straightness of their routes at a similar rate. Lastly, I found intraspecific differences in the orientation strategy that birds used to solve a dual strategy maze task (Chapter 5: 2018). These differences predicted habitat use after release: birds that utilised landmarks (allocentric strategies) showed less aversion to urban habitats (farm buildings/yards) than egocentric/mixed strategy birds, which is potentially due to the presence of large, stable landmarks within these habitats. In this thesis, I provide several empirical links between spatial cognitive ability and movement ecology across a range of ecological contexts. I suggest that very specific cognitive processes may govern particular movement behaviours and that there is not one overarching general spatial ability.European Commissio

Towards a critical concept of the statesperson

This article considers convergence between classical realism and critical theory in relation to pressing political problems. It argues that the spirit of both traditions can help develop critical reflection on the state as an agent of change. I suggest that too much recent critical theorization has avoided the state in its attention to social movements, but that a critical concept of state leadership is now required to address global threats and challenges. The article rehearses this critical concept in three stages. It considers, first, how the concept of national interest drives statecraft in the authorship of Hans Morgenthau and how complex this concept is both in its own terms and with regard to the political effects of the nuclear revolution. It develops, second, a multi-layered concept of responsibility as the guiding concept of statecraft in a world of increasingly incompatible demands. It argues, third, that these concepts of national interest and responsibility need to be aligned with global imperatives so that a greater marriage between the global and the national is possible. I conclude that it is the task of contemporary critical thought to address this present through a reimagined political realism

“This page faintly stained with / green”: Compost Aesthetics in John Steffler’s That Night We Were Ravenous

This essay examines how John Steffler’s poetry collection That Night We Were Ravenous (1998) destabilizes the humanist impulse to position the “authentic” subject at the core of ecological concerns by employing a compost aesthetic that enacts the innately fragmented nature of human subjectivity. It contends that, for Steffler, the poem is its own ecosystem, one that sits in precarious balance with the world around it. The poems in this collection are exploratory rather than expository; their attempts to discover the self in nature are as ephemeral, slippery, and paradoxical as the language that gives them life.  Instead of declaiming poetry as a resource that will allow a return to a utopian space, Steffler’s ecological poems position the human subject as a composite of usable waste attuned to the precarious chaos of nature.

Keeping it Intimate: A Meditation on the Power of Horror

The paper is a reading of Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head. It first interprets a dual historical element in Kristeva's text on "capital visions," her selection of exemplars of the artistic representation of severed heads. On the one hand, there are the aesthetic trajectories themselves, from skull art to artistic modernism. On the other hand, there is an implicit history of "horror" in psychoanalysis in this text, going from Freud through Lacan to Kristeva. The paper then indicates the tone of possibility and invitation that inhabits Kristeva’s treatment of horror in capital visions, which suggests that she does not divide aesthetics off from ethics. Finally, I underline the note of humor that enters into the psychoanalytic and aesthetic treatment of horror, once Kristeva has linked it to the feminine

The Return of Mythic Voice in the Aporias of Narcissism: Pleshette DeArmitt’s Ethical Idea

The ordeal of mourning, being so much harder than any thought its experience may deliver, bears out the impression developed in Julia Kristeva’s opening to The Severed Head—that thought is swift. She has recognized as well as anyone the interplay of blindness and insight. Nothing brings all this into starker evidence than the premature death of a loved other, a friend, or a true assistant in life and thought. There is a reminder in this that the new narratives of subjectivity on which Kristeva places a high value, and certainly the long life of meaning in the world, come at the price of the loss and mourning of our loved others. Pleshette DeArmitt’s book, The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-Love, has given the condition of narcissism an intricate place in this difficult if promising work.

Romancing the "Mysterious Bonds of Syntax": Allegory and the Ethics of Desire in Douglas Glover's "My Romance" and "Iglaf and Swan"

Douglas Glover posits that good fiction contains a rough tension between postmodern concerns with the structure of language and the meaning, or "aboutness," of the narrative. The philosophical premise of Glover's "My Romance" and "Iglaf and Swan" rests on the Sartrean notion that desire is ultimately a longing for nothingness. The "aboutness" of each story is the absence created by the death of a child, which triggers in the parent an existential confrontation with, and a desire to fill, the resultant void of nothingness. The narrative then becomes an allegory for the writing process itself. Just as the dead child becomes a symbol of absence with which the parent futilely seeks unification, language is only ever a linguistic signifier that can never reflect pure meaning. The desire to bridge the gap, or void, between signifier and signified can only be achieved through an ethical recognition of the other, which Glover demonstrates at both the thematic and textual levels