Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do (...) in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game's design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games. (shrink)

In Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, his study of Nietzsche’s integral philosophical corpus, Franck revisits the fundamental concepts of Nietzsche’s thought, from the death of God and the will to power, to the body as the seat of thinking and valuing, and finally to his conception of a post-Christian justice. The work engages Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s destruction of the Platonic-Christian worldview, showing how Heidegger’s hermeneutic overlooked Nietzsche’s powerful confrontation with revelation and justice by working through the Christian body, (...) as set forth in the Epistles of Saint Paul and reread both by Martin Luther and by German Idealism. Franck shows systematically how Nietzsche “transvalued” the metaphysical tenets of the Christian body of believers. In so doing, he provides an unparalleled demonstration of the coherence of Nietzsche’s project and the ways in which the revaluation of values, amor fati, and the trials of eternal recurrence reshape the living self toward a creative existence beyond original sin—indeed, beyond an ethics of “good” versus “evil.” Bergo and Farah’s clear translation introduces this work to an English-speaking audience for the first time. (shrink)

Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music-making subjects (composers, musicians, listeners) in the long European seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon early-modern bodies, described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, miraculous, and encompassing "the circulation of the humors, purification of the blood, dilation of the vessels and pores. In asking what this all meant at the time, the author considers musical scores and their surrounding texts as "somatic scripts" that (...) afford a range of somatic actions and reactions and can give us a glimpse into the historical embodied experience of organized sound. Starting from the Lutheran hymns and their accompanying intellectual traditions and ritual practices in German-speaking lands, the book moves with ease across repertories and regions, sacred and vernacular musics, domestic and public settings in order to sketch a "physiology of music" that is as historically illuminating as it is relevant for present-day performing practices and that sheds unprecedented light on how subjectivity was embodied through sound in early-modern Europe. (shrink)

Dance is regarded as visual art form by common arts and science perspectives. Definitions of dance as means of communication agree that its message is conveyed by the dancer/choreographer via the human body for the observer, leaving no doubt that dance is performed to be watched. Brain activation elicited by the visual perception of dance has also become a topic of interest in cognitive neuroscience, with regards to action observation in the context of learning, expertise and aesthetics. The view that (...) the aesthetic experience of dance is primarily a visual one is still shared by many artists and cultural institutions, yet there is growing interest in making dance performances accessible for individuals with visual impairment / blindness. Means of supporting the non-visual experience of dance include verbal (audio description), auditive (choreographed body sounds, movement sonification), and haptic (touch tour) techniques, applied for different purposes by artists and researchers, with three main objectives: to strengthen the cultural participation of a non-sighted audience in the cultural and aesthetic experience of dance; to expand the scope of dance as an artistic research laboratory toward novel ways of perceiving what dance can convey; and to inspire new lines of (neuro-cognitive) research beyond watching dance. Reviewing literature from different disciplines and drawing on the personal experience of an inclusive performance of Simon Mayer's “Sons of Sissy,” we argue that a non-exclusively visual approach can be enriching and promising for all three perspectives and conclude by proposing hypotheses for multidisciplinary lines of research. (shrink)

This paper was prompted by some striking similarities between both the ritual and the medical use of placenta in Ming China and in premodern Europe. Contrary to most accounts, which focus either on the rise of chemiatric medicine or on the growing interest in “exotic” substances, the seventeenth century in Europe also reveals a revived interest in substances from animals, including materials from human bodies. The paper will analyse the use of words signifying the placenta, and follow the trace of (...) vernacular knowledge about the placenta and its role in birth-giving, and in medieval medical texts on women's medicine. I will then analyse how the placenta is treated in systems of signatures in the age of alchemy and will try to trace the advent of more complicated preparations in the seventeenth century, and how between the eighteenth and the twenty-first century, the placenta meandered between a token of folk medicine (re)productive material and pharmaceutical resource. (shrink)

Infants can see someone pointing to one of two buckets and infer that the toy they are seeking is hidden inside. Great apes do not succeed in this task, but, surprisingly, domestic dogs do. However, whether children and dogs understand these communicative acts in the same way is not yet known. To test this possibility, an experimenter did not point, look, or extend any part of her body towards either bucket, but instead lifted and shook one via a centrally pulled (...) rope. She did this either intentionally or accidentally, and did or did not address her act to the subject using ostensive cues. Young 2-year-old children but not dogs understood the experimenter’s act in intentional conditions. While ostensive pulling of the rope made no difference to children’s success, it actually hindered dogs’ performance. We conclude that while human children may be capable of inferring communicative intent from a wide variety actions, so long as these actions are performed intentionally, dogs are likely to be less flexible in this respect. Their understanding of communicative intention may be more dependent upon bodily markers of communicative intent, including gaze, orientation, extended limbs, and vocalisations. This may be because humans have come under selective pressure to develop skills for communicating with absent interlocutors – where bodily co-presence is not possible. (shrink)

"This is a study of the unlikely 'career' of anxiety in 19th and 20th century philosophy, above all. Anxiety is an affect, something more subtle, sometimes more persistent, than an emotion or a passion. It lies at the intersectiona of embodiment and cognition, sensation and emotion. But anxiety also runs like a red thread through European thought beginning from receptions of Kant's transcendental project. Like a symptom of the quest to situate and give life to the philosophical subject, like a (...) symptom of an interrogation that stove to take form in European intellectual culture, *Angst* passes through Schelling's romanticism into Schopenhauer's metaphysics, until it was approached existentially by Kierkegaard. Nietzsche situates it in the long history of producing an animal able to promise. Its returns in the 20th century allow us to grasp the connection between phenomenology's exploration of passivity, followed by interpretations of the human reality in a world and open to a call that it can hardly assume. The study thus begins with Kant; it probes late Idealism and Romanticism, the metaphysical vitalism that flickered with Schopenhauer, the aesthetics and religious senses of *Angst* in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It turns to three avatars of anxiety in the evolving psychoanalysis before exploring the return to rationalism and formalism in 20th century phenomenology, followed again by efforts to resituate human beings in world and body as well as, significantly, before the anxiogenic "other""--. (shrink)

Inspired by three monographs of Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet, my presentation traces the rise of the new science of psychiatry in Revolutionary France, with Philippe Pinel and his student J.-E. Esquirol. As the directors of the division of the aliénés in the Hôpital Bicêtre (Paris), Pinel and Esquirol pioneered a therapeutic programme that spread out between their “traitement moral” (reasoning with the passions) and an “energetic repression,” wherever necessary. The discipline they created sought to gain autonomy from medicine treating (...) diseases of the body, much as pathology would do in regard to physiology, some fifty years later. Using Canguilhem, Foucault’s teacher and significant influence, I show how the unfolding of a science of disorders (for Canguilhem, this was pathology) poses questions of taxonomy and runs the inevitable ‘risk’ of extensive fragmentation. This is what happens in France after Pinel. However, Pinel, above all, will have made one contribution that—by Swain and Gauchet’s argument—stands in stark contrast to the theses of the young Foucault. Rather than sequestering and excluding the fou by forcing him or her into exaggerated, discursive revelations or silence, Pinel and Esquirol “discover” the sense, or sens , at the heart of madness, notably in what Pinel called “manie intermittente.” Esquirol takes this discovery one step further, to discern in various attacks, a certain rationality. This rather modern conception of madness exerts a considerable influence on literature, criticism, philosophy, and medicine in their time. Hegel’s understanding of madness will come directly from Pinel, and it will see in folie the internal division of subjective Reason. From this characterization comes a therapeutics based on the conviction that one could often reintegrate the mad into society, and avoid prolonged sequestration and exclusion. Thus the presentation focuses on Swain and Gauchet’s question to Foucault ( Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique , notably), using the work of Pinel and Hegel to illustrate their claim. (shrink)

Spatial region concepts such as “front,” “back,” “left,” and “right” reflect our typical interaction with space, and the corresponding surrounding regions have different statuses in memory. We examined the representation of spatial directions in the auditory space, specifically in how far natural response actions, such as orientation movements toward a sound source, would affect the categorization of egocentric auditory space. While standing in the middle of a circle with 16 loudspeakers, participants were presented acoustic stimuli coming from the loudspeakers in (...) randomized order, and verbally described their directions by using the concept labels “front,” “back,” “left,” “right,” “front-right,” “front-left,” “back-right,” and “back-left.” Response actions varied in three blocked conditions: (1) facing front, (2) turning the head and upper body to face the stimulus, and (3) turning the head and upper body plus pointing with the hand and outstretched arm toward the stimulus. In addition to a protocol of the verbal utterances, motion capture and video recording generated a detailed corpus for subsequent analysis of the participants’ behavior. Chi-square tests revealed an effect of response condition for directions within the left and right sides. We conclude that movement-based response actions influence the representation of auditory space, especially within the sides’ regions. Moreover, the representation of auditory space favors the front and the back regions in terms of resolution, which is possibly related to the physiological characteristics of the human auditory system, as well as to the ecological requirements of action control in the different regions. (shrink)

IntroductionSpatial navigation is a complex cognitive function that declines in older age. Finding one’s way around in familiar and new environments is crucial to live and function independently. However, the current literature illustrates the efficacy of spatial navigation interventions in rehabilitative contexts such as pathological aging and traumatic injury, but an overview of existing training studies for healthy older adults is missing. This scoping review aims to identify current evidence on existing spatial navigation interventions in healthy older adults and analyze (...) their efficacy.MethodsTo identify spatial navigation interventions and assessments and investigate their effectiveness, four electronic databases were searched. Two independent reviewers conducted a screening of title, abstract and full-texts and performed a quality assessment. Studies were eligible if published in English, the full text was accessible, at least one group of healthy older adults was included with mean age of 65 years or older, three or more spatial navigation-related training sessions were conducted and at least one spatial ability outcome was reported.ResultsTen studies were included, only healthy older adults were assessed further. Studies differed in sample size, type of training, total intervention duration, and intervention period.ConclusionThe spatial navigation abilities addressed and the measures applied to elicit intervention effects varied in quantity and methodology. Significant improvements were found for at least one spatial ability-related outcome in six of 10 interventions. Two interventions achieved a non-significant positive trend, another revealed no measurable post-training improvement, and one study did not report pre-post-differences. The results indicate that different types of spatial navigation interventions improve components of spatial abilities in healthy older adults. The existing body of research does not allow conclusions on transferability of the trained components on everyday life spatial navigation performance. Future research should focus on reproducing and extending the promising approaches of available evidence. From this, valuable insights on healthy aging could emerge.Trial RegistrationThis scoping review was preregistered at Open Science Framework. (shrink)

This review of Bettina Bergo’s book, Anxiety, draws attention both to the interweaving method of her account and to the substance of its implications. Her evocative historical and textual analyses, I argue, result in a widening conception of the mind that challenges our attempts to locate anxiety merely in the body or in consciousness.

The staying power of creationist objections to evolution needs explanation. It depends on the use of “blood” language. Both William Jennings Bryan and, a century later, Ken Ham connect evolution with the blood of predation and the blood of apes, and both also connect evolution with the blood of atonement. Drawing on Mary Douglas and Bettina Bildhauer, I suggest that blood becomes important to societies that image the social body on the human body. Blood reveals the body as porous (...) and vulnerable and therefore needing social work to be constructed as whole and bounded. Blood is the place where society conducts this work. I conclude that blood language is ineliminable from Christian discourse and indeed from discourses that model the social on the individual body. The solution, I suggest, is not to avoid the language of blood, but to continue to use it in ways that broaden its focus from human sin to human and animal suffering. (shrink)

The article is a reply to three reviews of my book Willensfreiheit (Berlin/New York 2007) which were published in a previous issue of this journal. In the book, I develop a libertarian account of free will that invokes neither uncaused events nor mind-body dualism nor agent causality. Against Bettina Walde’s criticism, I argue that a well-balanced libertarianism can evade the luck objection and that it should not be portrayed as positing tiny causal gaps in an otherwise deterministic world. Against (...) Marcus Willaschek’s Moorean compatibilism, I argue that our ordinary notion of agency commits us to genuine two-way abilities, i. e. to abilities to do otherwise given the same past and laws of nature. Against Christoph Jäger’s defence of van Inwagen’s consequence argument, I insist that this argument for incompati-bilism is seriously flawed and that libertarians are well-advised not to base their position upon it. (shrink)

L’auteure retrace les controverses qui ont émaillé l’histoire du principe de précaution en France dans les trente dernières années après son adoption au niveau international et européen. Elle montre que le principe de précaution constitue une dimension nouvelle de la rationalité adaptée aux défis de la société contemporaine.

Although lie detection procedures have been fundamentally criticized since their inception at the beginning of the 20th century, they are still in use around the world. In addition, they have created some remarkable appeal in the context of counterterrorism policies. Thereby, the links between science and fiction in this topic are quite tight and by no means arbitrary: In the progressive narrative of the lie detection devices, there is a promise of changing society for the better, which is entangled in (...) a fictional narrative provided by many cinematic and literary examples. By drawing on the concept of “diegetic technologies” formulated by David Kirby, we want to highlight the role of science fictional narratives in the historical development and current application of lie detection procedures. We therefore aim to use this conceptual frame to analyze the role of prevention-oriented mind reading procedures, which are developed for or already used in the “war on terror” with reference to their fictional predecessors. One virulent factor has to be highlighted in this context: The fictional engagement with possible new lie detection practices is in itself creating a legitimating ground for future security technologies. (shrink)

In Willensfreiheit Geert Keil seeks a better explanation of freedom of the will by investigating the connections between free will and determinism vs. indeterminism. Keil thinks that there is no freedom of the will without declaring determinism untrue. So, on the one hand freedom of the will seems to require indeterminism, but on the other hand, freely willed choices and decisions must be different from pure chance. The key, Keil thinks, is global indeterminism without local indeterminism — I doubt this.

Mhealth technology is mushrooming world-wide and, in a variety of forms, reaches increasing numbers of users in ever-widening contexts and virtually independent from standard medical evidence assessment. Yet, debate on the broader societal impact including in particular mapping and classification of ethical issues raised has been limited. This article, as part of an ongoing empirically informed ethical research project, provides an overview of ethical issues of mhealth applications with a specific focus on implications on autonomy as a key notion in (...) the debate. A multi-stage model of references to the potential of mhealth use for strengthening some or other form of self-determination will be proposed as a descriptive tool. It illustrates an assumed continuum of enhanced autonomy via mhealth broadly conceived: from patient to user autonomy, to improved health literacy, and finally to the vision of supra-individual empowerment and democratised, participatory health and medicine as a whole. On closer examination, however, these references are frequently ambivalent or vague, perpetuating the at times uncritical use of established autonomy concepts in medical ethics. The article suggests zooming in on the range of autonomy-related aspects against the backdrop of digital innovation and datafied health more generally, and on this basis add to existing frameworks for the ethical evaluation of mhealth more specifically. (shrink)

Is Plato’s philosophy still relevant for current issues in politics and political science? In order to answer this question, the contributions to this volume endeavour to re-read the Platonic dialogues and to interpret them in terms of textual hermeneutics on the one hand. On the other hand, they refer to Plato from a systematic point of view and apply his philosophy, in particular the method of Socratic dialogue, to discussions on contemporary political issues. The volume is dedicated to Barbara Zehnpfennig, (...) whose works aim at making Socratic–Platonic philosophy fruitful for the present on the basis of a new interpretation of Plato’s philosophy. With contributions by Anke Adamik, Sarah Al-Taher, Viktoria Bachmann, Philip Breuer, Johanna Falk-Seifert, Bettina Fröhlich, Benjamin A. Hahn, Hendrik Hansen, Thomas Haslböck, Raul Heimann, Johannes Frank Hoerlin, Vanessa Jansche, Peter Kainz, Christina Kast, Eva-Maria Kaufmann, Ulrich Kühn, Laura Martena, Julian Obenauer, Victor Peneff und Thomas Wimmer. (shrink)

This article explores how historians of emotions and historians of the senses can collaborate to write a history of emotional experience that takes seriously the corporeality of emotions. It invest...

The act of thought-thought as an act-would precede the thought thinking or becoming conscious of an act. The notion of act involves a violence essentially: the violence of transitivity, lacking in the transcendence of thought... Totality and Infinity The work of Emmanuel Levinas revolves around two preoccupations. First, his philosophical project can be described as the construction of a formal ethics, grounded upon the transcendence of the other human being and a subject's spontaneous responsibility toward that other. Second, Levinas has (...) written extensively on, and as a member of, the cultural and textual life of Judaism. These two concerns are intertwined. Their relation, however, is one of considerable complexity. Levinas' philosophical project stems directly from his situation as a Jewish thinker in the twentieth century and takes its particular form from his study of the Torah and the Talmud. It is, indeed, a hermeneutics of biblical experience. If inspired by Judaism, Levinas' ethics are not eo ipso confessional. What his ethics takes from Judaism, rather, is a particular way of conceiving transcendence and the other human being. It owes to the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber a logos of the world and of the holy, which acknowledges their incom mensurability without positing one as fallen and the other as supernal. (shrink)

Beauchamp and Childress’ definition of autonomous decision‐making includes the conditions of intentionality, understanding, and non‐control. In genetics, however, a relational conception of autonomy has been increasingly recognized. This article aims to empirically assess aspects of social influence in genetic testing decision‐making and to connect these with principlist and relational theories of autonomy. We interviewed 18 adult genetic counsellees without capacity issues considering predictive genetic testing for cancer predisposition for themselves and two counselling physicians in Switzerland. We conducted a qualitative analysis, (...) building on a grounded theory study about predictive genetic testing decision‐making. We found that some participants agreed to predictive genetic testing predominantly because relatives wanted them to do it, with some even acting contrary to their own convictions. Others, in contrast, based their decision on purely individualistic reasons but expressed difficulties in explaining their decision to their social environment. Healthcare professionals had a critical influence on decision‐making in many cases without being manipulative, as perceived by counsellees. Still, cases of coercion and social pressure occurred within social relationships. In conclusion, predictive genetic testing decision‐making includes relational and individualistic aspects, and both are compatible with autonomous decision‐making. While the principlist and relational notions of autonomy compete on a theoretical level, they are two sides of the same coin when used as analytical lenses for genetic testing decision‐making. Social acceptance of refusal of testing should be improved to mitigate social pressure. Individuals should be encouraged to decide for themselves how much their social environment influences their decision regarding predictive genetic testing. (shrink)

This Inspirational Guide To An Open, Critical Exchange Between India And The West Is Framed As A Tribute To Dr. Bettina Baumer, An Eminent Scholar Of Indology. Comprising 32 Essays, Segregated Into Three Sections Indian Philosophy And Spirituality, Indian Arts And Aesthetics, And Interreligious And Intercultural Dialogue.

We have now had some two decades of Levinas commentary. What remains to be said? Certainly one thing we have learned since Otherwise than Being is that Levinas’s philosophy and his talmudic and confessional writings nourish each other so profoundly that to approach Levinas without understanding the historyof Jewish philosophy — in its confrontations with neo-Platonism, Aristotle, Kant — is to risk misunderstanding Levinas. Insights into the interrelationships between Jewish thought and Levinas’s other humanism have been provided by thinkers like (...) Robert Gibbs, Claire Katz, Catherine Chalier, Shmuel Trigano, and Gérard Bensussan, to name but a few. But if one is not well versed in Jewish thought, will one be liable to abandon Levinas’s thought as an existentialized confessionalism? Perhaps. But I think the loss to philosophy would be considerable. (shrink)

Recently, many AI researchers and practitioners have embarked on research visions that involve doing AI for “Good”. This is part of a general drive towards infusing AI research and practice with ethical thinking. One frequent theme in current ethical guidelines is the requirement that AI be good for all, or: contribute to the Common Good. But what is the Common Good, and is it enough to want to be good? Via four lead questions, the concept of Ethics Pen-Testing identifies challenges (...) and pitfalls when determining, from an AI point of view, what the Common Good is and how it can be enhanced by AI. The current paper reports on a first evaluation of EPT. EPT is applicable to various artefacts that have ethical impact, including designs for or implementations of specific AI technology, and requirements engineering methods for eliciting which ethical settings to build into AI. The current study focused on the latter type of artefact. In four independent sessions, participants with close but varying involvements in “AI and ethics” were asked to deconstruct a method that has been proposed for eliciting ethical values and choices in autonomous car technology, an online experiment modelled on the Trolley Problem. The results suggest that EPT is well-suited to this task: the remarks made by participants lent themselves well to being structured by the four lead questions of EPT, in particular, regarding the question what the problem is and about which stakeholders define it. As part of the problem definition, the need became apparent for thorough technical domain knowledge in discussions of AI and ethics. Thus, participants questioned the framing and the presuppositions inherent in the experiment and the discourse on autonomous cars that underlies the experiment. They transitioned from discussing a specific AI artefact to discussing its role in wider socio-technical systems. Results also illustrate to what extent and how the requirements engineering method forces us to not only have a discussion about which values to “build into” AI systems, the substantive building blocks of the Common Good, but also about how we want to have this discussion at all. Thus, it forces us to become explicit about how we conceive of democracy and the constitutional state and the procedural building blocks of the Common Good. (shrink)

The representation of history continues to evolve in the domain of museum exhibitions. This evolution is informed in part by the creation of new display methods—many of which depart from the traditional conventions used to achieve the “museum effect”—in part by an increased attention to the museum–visitor relationship. In this context the ethical force of bearing witness, at times a crucial aspect of the museum experience, has emerged as a particularly compelling issue. In seeking to represent and address atrocity, injustice, (...) and the abrogation of human rights, museums have the potential to become “sites of conscience” and to encourage “historical consciousness.” Through a series of three exhibitions devoted to slavery, the New-York Historical Society demonstrated how such sites can be constructed and how objects can be deployed to represent extreme or “limit cases.” In this review/essay I investigate and interrogate these exhibitions, looking closely at the use of objects as a source of “indirect testimony” and at the “dialogical situation” that might arise in an encounter among objects, exhibit narratives, and visitors. Thinking in terms of point of view, I look at the variety of rhetorical platforms from which objects speak in these exhibitions; thinking in terms of syntax, I look at the effects of ordering and of the radical juxtaposition of objects; thinking in terms of irony, I look at the provocations of double-voiced narratives and at how objects are used to support those historical sentences. (shrink)

The Liverpool Care Pathway is an interdisciplinary protocol, aiming to ensure that dying patients receive dignified and individualized treatment and care at the end-of-life. LCP was originally developed in 1997 in the United Kingdom from a model of cancer care successfully established in hospices. It has since been introduced in many countries, including Norway. The method was withdrawn in the UK in 2013. This review investigates whether LCP has been adapted and validated for use in nursing homes and for dying (...) people with dementia. This systematic review is based on a systematic literature search of MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, and Web of Science. The search identified 12 studies, but none describing an evidence-based adaption of LCP to nursing home patients and people with dementia. No studies described the LCP implementation procedure, including strategies for discontinuation of medications, procedures for nutrition and hydration, or the testing of such procedures in nursing homes. No effect studies addressing the assessment and treatment of pain and symptoms that include dying nursing home patients and people with dementia are available. LCP has not been adapted to nursing home patients and people with dementia. Current evidence, i.e. studies investigating the validity and reliability in clinically relevant settings, is too limited for the LCP procedure to be recommended for the population at hand. There is a need to develop good practice in palliative medicine, Advance Care Planning, and disease-specific recommendations for people with dementia. (shrink)

In transparent orthographies, persistent reading fluency difficulties are a major cause of poor reading skills in primary school. The purpose of the present study was to investigate effects of a syllable-based reading intervention on word reading fluency and reading comprehension among German-speaking poor readers in Grade 4. The 16-session intervention was based on analyzing the syllabic structure of words to strengthen the mental representations of syllables and words that consist of these syllables. The training materials were designed using the 500 (...) most frequent syllables typically read by fourth graders. The 75 poor readers were randomly allocated to the treatment or the control group. Results indicate a significant and strong effect on the fluency of recognizing single words, whereas text-level reading comprehension was not significantly improved by the training. The specific treatment effect provides evidence that a short syllable-based approach works even in older poor readers at the end of primary school. (shrink)

School psychologists are asked to systematically evaluate the effects of their work to ensure quality standards. Given the different types of methods applied to different users of school psychology measuring the effects of school psychological services is a complex task. Thus, the focus of our scoping review was to systematically investigate the state of past research on the measurement of the effects of school psychological services published between 1998 and 2018 in eight major school psychological journals. Of the 5,048 peer-reviewed (...) articles published within this period, 623 were coded by two independent raters as explicitly refering to school psychology or counseling in the school context in their titles or abstracts. However, only 22 included definitions of effects of school psychological services or described outcomes used to evaluate school psychological services based on full text screening. These findings revealed that measurement of the effects of school psychological services has not been a focus of research despite its' relevance in guidelines of school psychological practice. (shrink)

​Für die Wahrnehmung von Politik und die Beteiligung am politischen Leben einer Gesellschaft ist politisches Wissen notwendig. Der Band bündelt aktuelle Studien zur Bedeutung, zur Messung sowie zu den Bestimmungsfaktoren und Konsequenzen des politischen Wissens. Die Beiträge geben erste Antworten auf drängende Fragen und weisen auf Lücken in der Forschung zum politischen Wissen in Deutschland hin.

This book consists of transcripts from two lecture courses Levinas delivered in 1975-76, his last year at the Sorbonne. They cover some of the most pervasive themes of his thought and were written at a time when he had just published his most important—and difficult—book, _Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence._ Both courses pursue issues related to the question at the heart of Levinas's thought: ethical relation. The Foreword and Afterword place the lectures in the context of his work as (...) a whole, rounding out this unique picture of Levinas the thinker and the teacher. The lectures are essential to a full understanding of Levinas for three reasons. First, he seeks to explain his thought to an audience of students, with a clarity and an intensity altogether different from his written work. Second, the themes of God, death, and time are not only crucial for Levinas, but they lead him to confront their treatment by the main philosphers of the great continental tradition. Thus his discussions of accounts of death by Heidegger, Hegel, and Bloch place Levinas's thought in a broader context. Third, the basic concepts Levinas employs are those of _Otherwise than Being_ rather than the earlier _Totality and Infinity_: patience, obsession, substitution, witness, traumatism. There is a growing recognition that the ultimate standing of Levinas as a philosopher may well depend on his assessment of those terms. These lectures offer an excellent introduction to them that shows how they contribute to a wide range of traditional philosophical issues. (shrink)

The term ‘locked-in’ syndrome (LIS) describes a medical condition in which persons concerned are severely paralyzed and at the same time fully conscious and awake. The resulting anarthria makes it impossible for these patients to naturally communicate, which results in diagnostic as well as serious practical and ethical problems. Therefore, developing alternative, muscle-independent communication means is of prime importance. Such communication means can be realized via brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) circumventing the muscular system by using brain signals associated with preserved cognitive, (...) sensory, and emotional brain functions. Primarily, BCIs based on electrophysiological measures have been developed and applied with remarkable success. Recently, also blood flow–based neuroimaging methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), have been explored in this context. After reviewing recent literature on the development of especially hemodynamically based BCIs, we introduce a highly reliable and easy-to-apply communication procedure that enables untrained participants to motor-independently and relatively effortlessly answer multiple-choice questions based on intentionally generated single-trial fMRI signals that can be decoded online. Our technique takes advantage of the participants’ capability to voluntarily influence certain spatio-temporal aspects of the blood oxygenation level–dependent (BOLD) signal: source location (by using different mental tasks), signal onset and offset. We show that healthy participants are capable of hemodynamically encoding at least four distinct information units on a single-trial level without extensive pretraining and with little effort. Moreover, realtime data analysis based on simple multi-filter correlations allows for automated answer decoding with a high accuracy (94.9%) demonstrating the robustness of the presented method.. (shrink)