Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856

The 19th century certainly knew how to appeal to the sensibilities of the British public, marketing sensation and making the audience’s hair stand on end and their flesh creep. At the time when geology and paleontology emerged as new scientific disciplines, scientists particularly took pains to popularise their theories and finds through dramatic mises-en-scènes. Though 19th-century geologists contributed to the popularisation of their discipline through public platforms (whether in the shape..

David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and the Representations of Nature

Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and the Representations of Nature, edited by David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, is a volume which derives from a conference held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and entitled “Visions of Empire”. Although the conference and the hardback publication that followed are not recent, the fresh publication of the collection in paperback fully deserves a review. This engaging book deals with representations of nature and tackles the significance..

Saverio Tomaiuolo, Victorian Unfinished Novels: The Imperfect Page

The field of literature abounds with unfinished novels which have often inspired later writers to rewrite the story with a closure. Recently, Dan Simmons’s revision of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in Drood (2009) took fans of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins into the catacombs beneath London, and many neo-Victorian novels are frequently sequels of unfinished Victorian novels. These unfinished novels, however, are seldom examined by literary critics, as Saverio Tomaiuolo’s Victorian Unfinished..

Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Ingrid H. Tague’s Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain is Animalbus’s fifth volume – a series which includes books such as Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (2012), Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective (2012), edited by Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee and Paul Youngquist, and Animals on Display: The Creaturely in Museums, Zoos and Natural History (2013), edited by Liv Emma Thorsen, Karen A. Rader ..

Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Ingrid H. Tague’s Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain is Animalbus’s fifth volume – a series which includes books such as Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (2012), Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective (2012), edited by Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee and Paul Youngquist, and Animals on Display: The Creaturely in Museums, Zoos and Natural History (2013), edited by Liv Emma Thorsen, Karen A. Rader ..

Ann C. Colley, Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain: Zoos, Collections, Portraits and Maps

From the eighteenth century and throughout the Victorian period wild animals were recurrently exhibited in Britain. Locked up behind bars in zoological gardens or menageries, these exotic animals entertained children and adults from all social classes just as they emblematized the global expansion of the British empire. But the Victorians particularly assigned meanings to the wild skins that were exhibited throughout the country, as Ann C. Colley’s Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain argue..

Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion

Where is the seat of emotions and has it changed through time? This is one of the questions that Fay Bound Alberti’s Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion addresses, in a study that traces the trajectory of the meanings of the heart from the symbol of emotions to an organ subject to pathologies, medical theorizing and specialization. Still, as the book makes explicit, it is the enduring presence of the heart as an emotional organ which explains that the heart remains a problemat..

Lawrence Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence has recently been republished in paperback, and it is a very good opportunity to present Frank’s argument to those who are still unfamiliar with it, as interdisciplinary approaches are increasingly in vogue in the humanities. Indeed, Frank’s study sets side by side detective fiction and the history of science, probing the connections between the two through the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. At a time wh..

Functional imaging reveals working memory and attention interact to produce the attentional blink

Copyright @ 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology PressIf two centrally presented visual stimuli occur within approximately half a second of each other, the second target often fails to be reported correctly. This effect, called the attentional blink (AB; Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., & Arnell, K. M. Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: An attentional blink? Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and Performance, 18, 849-860, 1992], has been attributed to a resource "bottleneck," likely arising as a failure of attention during encoding into or retrieval from visual working memory (WM). Here we present participants with a hybrid WM-AB study while they undergo fMRI to provide insight into the neural underpinnings of this bottleneck. Consistent with a WM-based bottleneck account, fronto-parietal brain areas exhibited a WM load-dependent modulation of neural responses during the AB task. These results are consistent with the view that WM and attention share a capacity-limited resource and provide insight into the neural structures that underlie resource allocation in tasks requiring joint use of WM and attention.This research was supported by a project grant (071944) from the Wellcome Trust to Kimron Shapiro

Frontostriatal Maturation Predicts Cognitive Control Failure to Appetitive Cues in Adolescents

Adolescent risk-taking is a public health issue that increases the odds of poor lifetime outcomes. One factor thought to influence adolescents' propensity for risk-taking is an enhanced sensitivity to appetitive cues, relative to an immature capacity to exert sufficient cognitive control. We tested this hypothesis by characterizing interactions among ventral striatal, dorsal striatal, and prefrontal cortical regions with varying appetitive load using fMRI scanning. Child, teen, and adult participants performed a go/no-go task with appetitive (happy faces) and neutral cues (calm faces). Impulse control to neutral cues showed linear improvement with age, whereas teens showed a nonlinear reduction in impulse control to appetitive cues. This performance decrement in teens was paralleled by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum. Prefrontal cortical recruitment correlated with overall accuracy and showed a linear response with age for no-go versus go trials. Connectivity analyses identified a ventral frontostriatal circuit including the inferior frontal gyrus and dorsal striatum during no-go versus go trials. Examining recruitment developmentally showed that teens had greater between-subject ventral-dorsal striatal coactivation relative to children and adults for happy no-go versus go trials. These findings implicate exaggerated ventral striatal representation of appetitive cues in adolescents relative to an intermediary cognitive control response. Connectivity and coactivity data suggest these systems communicate at the level of the dorsal striatum differentially across development. Biased responding in this system is one possible mechanism underlying heightened risk-taking during adolescence