The study investigated the influence of campus environmental factors on job commitments. The research design was quantitative descriptive sample survey of ex-post facto type while the population includes both male and female senior non-teaching staff of Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ogun State. Multi-stage sampling technique was used in choosing 200 participants selected from nine faculties and one college. A structured and close-ended questionnaire titled ‘Campus Environmental Factors and Job Commitment Questionnaire’ with reliability co-efficient of 0.85 obtained through Cronbach alpha methods was (...) administered. 170 were retrieved from the 200 instruments administered. Data were analysed using frequency count, simple percentage, Pearson Correlation, and t test of significance. The study demonstrated a significant positive influence of campus environmental factors on job commitments of staff in the university. Useful recommendations were also raised. (shrink)

Ecology is indispensable to understanding the biological world and addressing the environmental problems humanity faces. Its philosophy has never been more important. In this book, James Justus introduces readers to the philosophically rich issues ecology poses. Besides its crucial role in biological science generally, climate change, biodiversity loss, and other looming environmental challenges make ecology's role in understanding such threats and identifying solutions to them all the more critical. When ecology is applied and its insights marshalled to address these (...) problems and guide policy formation, interesting philosophical issues emerge. Justus sets them out in detail, and explores the often ethically charged dimensions of applied ecological science, using accessible language and a wealth of scientifically-informed examples. (shrink)

Robustness concepts are often invoked to manage two obstacles confronting models of ecological systems: complexity and uncertainty. The intuitive idea is that any result derived from many idealized but credible models is thereby made more reliable or is better confirmed. An appropriate basis for this inference has proven elusive. Here, several representations of robustness analysis are vetted, paying particular attention to complex models of ecosystems and the global climate. The claim that robustness is itself confirmatory because robustness analysis employs a (...) Bayesian variety-of-evidence argument is criticized, but recent overwhelming pessimism about robustness may have a silver lining. (shrink)

The waning popularity of logical empiricism and the supposed discovery of insurmountable technical difficulties led most philosophers to abandon the project to formulate a formal criterion of empirical significance. Such a criterion would delineate claims that observation can confirm or disconfirm from those it cannot. Although early criteria were clearly inadequate, criticisms made of later, more sophisticated criteria were often indefensible or easily answered. Most importantly, Carnap’s last criterion was seriously misinterpreted and an amended version of it remains tenable.

As a discipline distinct from ecology, conservation biology emerged in the 1980s as a rigorous science focused on protecting biodiversity. Two algorithmic breakthroughs in information processing made this possible: place-prioritization algorithms and geographical information systems. They provided defensible, data-driven methods for designing reserves to conserve biodiversity that obviated the need for largely intuitive and highly problematic appeals to ecological theory at the time. But the scientific basis of these achievements and whether they constitute genuine scientific progress has been criticized. We (...) counter by pointing out important inaccuracies about the science and rejecting the apparent theory-first focus. More broadly, the case study reveals significant limitations of the predominant epistemic-semantic conceptions of scientific progress and the considerable merits of pragmatic, practically-oriented accounts. (shrink)

Perhaps no concept has been thought more important to ecological theorizing than the niche. Without it, technically sophisticated and well-regarded accounts of character displacement, ecological equivalence, limiting similarity, and others would seemingly never have been developed. The niche is also widely considered the centerpiece of the best candidate for a distinctively ecological law, the competitive exclusion principle. But the incongruous array and imprecise character of proposed definitions of the concept square poorly with its apparent scientific centrality. I argue this definitional (...) diversity and imprecision reflects a problematic conceptual indeterminacy that challenges its putative indispensability in ecology. (shrink)

Ecologists have proposed several incompatible definitions of ecological stability. Emulating physicists, mathematical ecologists commonly define it as Lyapunov stability. This formalizes the problematic concept by integrating it into a well‐developed mathematical theory. The formalization also seems to capture the intuition that ecological stability depends on how ecological systems respond to perturbation. Despite these advantages, this definition is flawed. Although Lyapunov stability adequately characterizes perturbation responses of many systems studied in physics, it does not for ecological systems. This failure reveals a (...) limitation of its underlying mathematical theory, and an important difference between dynamic systems modeling in physics and ecology. *Received March 2006; revised June 2008. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, 151 Dodd Hall, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Abstract Recent criticisms of intuition from experimental philosophy and elsewhere have helped undermine the authority of traditional conceptual analysis. As the product of more empirically informed philosophical methodology, this result is compelling and philosophically salutary. But the negative critiques rarely suggest a positive alternative. In particular, a normative account of concept determination—how concepts should be characterized—is strikingly absent from such work. Carnap's underappreciated theory of explication provides such a theory. Analyses of complex concepts in empirical sciences illustrates and supports this (...) claim, and counteracts the charge explication is only suitable for highly mathematical, axiomatic contexts. Explication is also defended against the influential criticism it is “philosophically unilluminating”. Content Type Journal Article Category Original paper in Philosophy of Science Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s13194-011-0027-5 Authors James Justus, Philosophy Department, Florida State University and University of Sydney, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA Journal European Journal for Philosophy of Science Online ISSN 1879-4920 Print ISSN 1879-4912. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology often does not sufficiently document the innate constraint and domain specificity required for strong adaptationist argument. We develop these criteria within the domain of music. First, we advocate combining computational, developmental, cross-cultural, and neuroscience research to address the ways in which a domain is innately constrained. Candidate constraints in music include the importance of the octave and other simple pitch ratios, the categorization of the octave into tones, the importance of melodic contour, tonal hierarchies, and principles of grouping (...) and meter. Second, we advocate combining psychological, neuroscience, and genetic research across cognitive domains to address the domain specificity of such constraints. Currently available evidence suggests that the innate constraints in music are not specific to that domain, making it unclear which domain(s) provided the relevant selection pressures. (shrink)

Musical systems develop associations over time between aspects of musical form and concepts from outside of the music. Experienced listeners internalize these connotations, such that the formal elements bring to mind their extra-musical meanings. An example of musical form-meaning mapping is the association that Western listeners have between the major and minor modes and happiness and sadness, respectively. We revisit the emotional semantics of musical mode in a study of 44 American participants (musicians and non-musicians) who each evaluated the relatedness (...) of 96 melody-word pairs. Among the tonal melodies, we manipulated mode (major and minor) and timbre (clarinet and flute) while systematically controlling for other musical factors including pitch register and melodic contour. Similarly, among the English words, we manipulated word affect (happy and sad) while systematically controlling for other lexical factors including frequency and word length. Results demonstrated that participants provided a higher proportion of related responses for major melodies paired with happy words and minor melodies paired with sad words than for the reverse pairings. This interaction between mode and word affect was highly significant for both musicians and non-musicians, albeit with a larger effect for the former group. Further interactions with timbre suggested that while both clarinet and flute conveyed happiness when in the major mode, the clarinet was somewhat more successful than the flute at conveying sadness in the minor mode. Debriefing questionnaires suggested that the majority of the participants, including all of the non-musicians, had no awareness of the major-minor manipulation, and instead directed their attention to register and contour. We argue that the affective character of the major and minor modes is but one example of form-meaning mapping in music, and suggest further exploration of the roles of timbre, register, and contour in conveying musical emotions. (shrink)

Methodological individualism has a long, successful, and controversial track record in the social sciences. Its record in ecology is much shorter but proving as successful and controversial with so-called individual-based models. Distinctions and debates about methodological individualism in social sciences clarify the commitments of this general, individualistic approach to modeling ecological phenomena and show that there is a lot recommending it. In particular, a representational priority on individual organisms yields a cogent albeit deflationary account of ecological emergence and helps reveal (...) how quite disparate models and theories in ecology might be unified. (shrink)

Justus Hartnack provides a highly accessible, philosophically astute introduction to Hegel’s logic.

A history of epistemology ranging from Hume to Kant, written by Justus Hartnack, who has been recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of our time.

In this essay, Timothy Justus reviews the book Brain and Music (2012) by Stefan Koelsch, first providing a sketch of the book’s contents, including examples of Koelsch’s empirical work from four core areas (1) musical syntax, (2) musical semantics, (3) music and action, and (4) music and emotion. Justus then proceeds to discuss the continuous nature of cognitive domains and the continuous nature of mental activity.

Three experiments investigated the modularity of harmonic expectations that are based on cultural schemata despite the availability of more predictive veridical information. Participants were presented with prime–target chord pairs and made an intonation judgment about each target. Schematic expectation was manipulated by the combination of prime and target, with some transitions being schematically more probable than others. Veridical information in the form of prime–target previews, local transition probabilities, or valid versus invalid previews was also provided. Processing was facilitated when a (...) schematically probable target chord followed the prime. Furthermore, this effect was independent of all manipulations of veridical expectation. A solution to L. B. Meyer's (1967b) query "On Rehearing Music" is suggested, in which schematic knowledge contributes to harmonic expectation in a modular manner regardless of whether any veridical knowledge exists. (shrink)

Loop analysis is a method of qualitative modeling anticipated by Sewall Wright and systematically developed by Richard Levins. In Levins’ (1966) distinctions between modeling strategies, loop analysis sacrifices precision for generality and realism. Besides criticizing the clarity of these distinctions, Orzack and Sober (1993) argued qualitative modeling is conceptually and methodologically problematic. Loop analysis of the stability of ecological communities shows this criticism is unjustified. It presupposes an overly narrow view of qualitative modeling and underestimates the broad role models play (...) in scientific research, especially in helping scientists represent and understand complex systems. (shrink)

The current work investigated whether differences in phonological overlap between the past- and present-tense forms of regular and irregular verbs can account for the graded neurophysiological effects of verb regularity observed in past-tense priming designs. Event-related potentials were recorded from 16 healthy participants who performed a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately preceded present-tense targets. To minimize intra-modal phonological priming effects, cross-modal presentation between auditory primes and visual targets was employed, and results were compared to a companion intra-modal auditory (...) study (Justus, T., Larsen, J., de Mornay Davies, P., Swick, D. (2008). Interpreting dissociations between regular and irregular past-tense morphology: evidence from event-related potentials. Cognitive, Affective, Behavioral Neuroscience, 8, 178–194.). For both regular and irregular verbs, faster response times and reduced N400 components were observed for present-tense forms when primed by the corresponding past-tense forms. Although behavioral facilitation was observed with a pseudopast phonological control condition, neither this condition nor an orthographic-phonological control produced significant N400 priming effects. Instead, these two types of priming were associated with a post-lexical anterior negativity (PLAN). Results are discussed with regard to dual- and single-system theories of inflectional morphology, as well as intra- and cross-modal prelexical priming. (shrink)

Two priming experiments demonstrated exogenous attentional persistence to the fundamental auditory dimensions of frequency (Experiment 1) and time (Experiment 2). In a divided-attention task, participants responded to an independent dimension, the identification of three-tone sequence patterns, for both prime and probe stimuli. The stimuli were specifically designed to parallel the local–global hierarchical letter stimuli of [Navon D. (1977). Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 353–383] and the task was designed to parallel subsequent (...) work in visual attention using Navon stimuli [Robertson, L. C. (1996). Attentional persistence for features of hierarchical patterns. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 125, 227–249; Ward, L. M. (1982). Determinants of attention to local and global features of visual forms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 8, 562–581]. The results are discussed in terms of previous work in auditory attention and previous approaches to auditory local–global processing. (shrink)

Gödel interpreted Heyting arithmetic HA in a “logic-free” fragment T 0 of his theory T of primitive recursive functionals of finite types by his famous Dialectica-translation D . This works because the logic of HA is extremely simple. If the logic of the interpreted system is different—in particular more complicated—, it forces us to look for different and more complicated functional translations. We discuss the arising logical problems for arithmetical and set theoretical systems from HA to CZF . We want (...) to test the thesis: While the functionals take care of the proof theoretic strength of the interpreted system, it is the functional translation that has to cope with the logical complexities of the system. (shrink)

This chapter reviews the field of music perception and cognition, which is the area of cognitive psychology devoted to determining the mental mechanisms underlying our appreciation of music. The chapter begins with the study of pitch, including the constructive nature of pitch perception and the cognitive structures reflecting its simultaneous and sequential organization in Western tonal‐harmonic music. This is followed by reviews of temporal organization in music, and of musical performance and ability. Next, literature concerning the cognitive neuroscience of music (...) is examined, including studies of neuropsychology, neuroimaging, and event‐related potentials. The chapter concludes with a discussion of developmental music cognition, cross‐cultural music cognition, and the evolutionary psychology of music. (shrink)

The rise of experimental philosophy has placed metaphilosophical questions, particularly those concerning concepts, at the center of philosophical attention. X-phi offers empirically rigorous methods for identifying conceptual content, but what exactly it contributes towards evaluating conceptual content remains unclear. We show how x-phi complements Rudolf Carnap’s underappreciated methodology for concept determination, explication. This clarifies and extends x-phi’s positive philosophical import, and also exhibits explication’s broad appeal. But there is a potential problem: Carnap’s account of explication was limited to empirical and (...) logical concepts, but many concepts of interest to philosophers are essentially normative. With formal epistemology as a case study, we show how x-phi assisted explication can apply to normative domains. (shrink)

Provides a systematic framework for understanding the broad features of the world and nature, and for locating the understanding of self and society within nature. Includes Buchler's reply to his critics. No bibliography.

A reprint of the Macmillan edition of 1968. While most interpretive studies of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ are either too scholarly or too superficial to be of practical use to students, Hartnack has achieved a concise comprehensive analysis of the work in a lucid style that communicates the essence of extraordinarily complex arguments in the simplest possible way. An ideal companion to the _First Critique_, especially for those grappling with the work for the first time.

In the classical view of emotion, the basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) are assumed to be natural kinds that are perceiver-independent. Correspondingly, each is thought to possess a distinct neural and physiological signature, accompanied by an expression that is universally recognized despite differences in culture, era, and language. An alternative, the theory of constructed emotion, emphasizes that, while the underlying interoceptive sensations are biological, emotional concepts are learned, socially constructed categories, characterized by many-to-many relationships among diverse (...) brain states, physiological signs, facial movements, and their emotional meanings. This biocultural view permits a greater degree of cultural-historical specificity when interpreting the emotions of others. In this article, I consider the implications of the theory of constructed emotion for cognitive film theory, especially regarding the interpretation of depicted facial expressions of emotion as one aspect of cinematic expression. Particular attention is given to recent work revisiting the Kuleshov effect, in which the meaning of a character’s facial expression is thought to change in the context of a montage. (shrink)

In this article, I first address the question of how musical forms come to represent meaning—that is, the semantics of music—and illustrate an important conceptual distinction articulated by Leonard Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in Music between absolute or intramusical meaning and referential or extramusical meaning through a critical analysis of two recent films. Second, building examples of scholarship around a single piece of music frequently used in film—Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings—I follow the example set by Murray Smith in (...) Film, Art, and the Third Culture and discuss the complementary approaches of the humanities, the behavioral sciences, and the natural sciences to understanding music and its use in film. (shrink)

CONSIDERING the vast extent of its use, the idea involved in the terms "the world" and "the universe" has received less than adequate philosophic attention. Common speech, religion, literary art, theoretical physics, and philosophy all seem to require and apply the terms frequently. Yet it is safe to say that no one is very confident about their meaning and that no appreciable range of meaning has developed cumulatively. In their most rudimentary and most insistent sense, the terms suggest "everything," "all (...) there is," and perhaps we must in some way cling to this sense, whatever else we emerge with. Some people like to speak of an all-embracing totality, but they are uncertain about what is implied. Beyond this, and more precariously, "the world" is often tied to the notion of a whole or wholeness, regarded not only as inclusive, but as an overarching unity which encompasses whatever pluralities there are, and as an overarching continuity which encompasses whatever discontinuities there are. These ideas are notoriously full of difficulties, although it may be questioned, as it will be here, whether the most serious underlying difficulties have been identified or metaphysically formulated in a satisfactory way. (shrink)

This book gives a detailed treatment of functional interpretations of arithmetic, analysis, and set theory. The subject goes back to Gödel's Dialectica interpretation of Heyting arithmetic which replaces nested quantification by higher type operations and thus reduces the consistency problem for arithmetic to the problem of computability of primitive recursive functionals of finite types. Regular functional interpretations, i.e. Dialectica and Diller-Nahm interpretation as well as Kreisel's modified realization, together with their Troelstra-style hybrids, are applied to constructive as well as classical (...) systems of arithmetic, analysis, and set theory. They yield relative consistency and conservativity results and closure under relevant rules of the theories in question as well as axiomatic characterizations of the functional translations. Prerequisites are: familiarity with classical and intuitionistic predicate logic, basics of computability theory, Gödel's incompleteness theorems. (shrink)

Gödel's dialectica interpretation of Heyting arithmetic HA may be seen as expressing a lack of confidence in our understanding of unbounded quantification. Instead of formally proving an implication with an existential consequent or with a universal antecedent, the dialectica interpretation asks, under suitable conditions, for explicit 'interpreting' instances that make the implication valid. For proofs in constructive set theory CZF-, it may not always be possible to find just one such instance, but it must suffice to explicitly name a set (...) consisting of such interpreting instances. The aim of eliminating unbounded quantification in favor of appropriate constructive functionals will still be obtained, as our ∧-interpretation theorem for constructive set theory in all finite types CZFω- shows. By changing to a hybrid interpretation ∧q, we show closure of CZFω- under rules that – in stronger forms – have already been studied in the context of Heyting arithmetic. In a similar spirit, we briefly survey modified realizability of CZFω- and its hybrids. Central results of this paper have been proved by Burr 2000a and Schulte 2006, however, for different translations. We use a simplified interpretation that goes back to Diller and Nahm 1974. A novel element is a lemma on absorption of bounds which is essential for the smooth operation of our translation. (shrink)

The paper presents a series of German-Jewish readings of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise" stretching from the Enlightenment to the early post-1945 period. Already the first Jewish reader, Moses Mendelssohn, did not focus his interpretation of this drama on the so-called "parabel of the rings," where Nathan is commonly said to preach religious tolerance. Rather, Mendelssohn concentrates on act IV, scene 7, which expounds Lessing's concept of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and Nathan's experience of Christian persecution. With the upsurge (...) of German anti-Semitism in the late 19th and 20th century, this scene served first as a sign of German-Christian empathy for Jewish suffering, and thus of hope, then as a reminder of recent prosecutions. It seemed to foreshadow, and eventually became overshadowed by, the Shoah. (shrink)

Gottfried Keller's “A Village Romeo and Juliet” contains an astonishing number of neuter terms that are of key importance to this novella. This observation is in line with Keller's predilection for miniaturized worlds and diminutives, played out in this narrative through two basic traits: the reduction of the Shakespearean tragedy to a novella that is a “village story” and the nicknames given to its female protagonist. Around one pole of neutrality the story assembles a cluster of terms that convey things (...) in an abstract, generalized manner. Other neutral nouns make deeply personal concerns look as if they were governed by some overriding, a-personal force. In this vein, the text tends to de-personalize human actions by expressing them in the grammatical form of nominalized infinitives. Inconspicuous idiomatic phrases seem to hide, as in the Freudian Id, the menacing power of the drives. Precisely by revealing that the narrative's sphere is constructed of neutral elementary particles, the text transforms and transubstantiates what it represents into the neutrality of the script. It does so solely, it seems, to make palpable that this literature is charged with the sensuality of the genders. (shrink)

Suppose that by the term God we mean, among other things, a being who has always been in existence. Although this may not be what all theologians or philosophers who use that term would claim, it does not seem to be unreasonable to make the claim. The only alternative would be to claim, not of course that God began to exist at a certain time, but that he does not exist in time. But since such a claim seems to be (...) difficult to give a meaning, I prefer the more reasonable claim, to common sense at least, that God must be a being who always has been in existence. But despite the fact that the claim of always having been in existence appears to be a meaningful claim, it nevertheless is a concept which easily collapses. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

How does the mind lend itself to artistic creation and appreciation? How should we study minds and arts in ways that transform our understanding of both? This book examines the concepts of art and cognition from the complementary perspectives of philosophy, the empirical sciences, and the humanities. Central chapters combine examples of visual art, music, literature, and film with the properties of cognition that they illuminate, including 4E cognition, predictive processing, and theories of affect and emotion. These aspects of cognition (...) are undergoing theoretical shifts that complicate established understandings of the mind and its encounter with the arts. As the book takes stock of recent developments in aesthetics that have incorporated empirical findings (Naturalized Aesthetics), it also envisions a new generation of cognitive science with robust ties to history and literature (the Cognitive Humanities). In this way, Cognition and the Arts can be seen as a model of interdisciplinary scholarship. (shrink)

ebec and Queensland, we applied four methods to assess the extent to which environmental surrogates can represent biodiversity components: (1) surrogacy graphs; (2) marginal representation plots; (3) Hamming distance function; and (4) Syrjala statistical test for spatial congruence. For Qu´ebec we used 719 faunal and floral species as biodiversity components, and for Queensland we used 2348 plant species. We used four climatic parameter types (annual mean temperature, minimum temperature during the coldest quarter, maximum temperature during the hottest quarter, and annual (...) precipitation), along with slope, elevation, aspect, and soil types, as environmental surrogates. To study the effect of scale, we analyzed the data at seven spatial scales ranging from 0.01◦ to 0.10◦ longitude and latitude. At targeted representations of 10% for environmental surrogates and biodiversity components, all four methods indicated that using a full set of environmental surrogates systematically provided better results than selecting areas at random, usually ensuring that ≥90% of the biodiversity components achieved the 10%. (shrink)

Neuropsychological dissociations between regular and irregular English past-tense morphology have been reported using a lexical decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets. We present N400 event-related potential data from healthy participants using the same design. Both regular and irregular past-tense forms primed corresponding present-tense forms, but with a longer duration for irregular verbs. Phonological control conditions suggested that differences in formal overlap between prime and target contribute to, but do not account for, this difference, suggesting a link (...) between irregular morphology and semantics. Further analysis dividing the irregular verbs into two categories (weak irregular and strong) revealed that priming for strong verbs was reliably stronger than that for weak irregular and regular verbs, which were statistically indistinguishable from one another. We argue that, although we observe a regular-irregular dissociation, the nature of this dissociation is more consistent with single- than with dual-system models of inflectional morphology. (shrink)

Beyond the major-minor tonality that characterizes classical and contemporary Western musical genres, Turkish classical and folk music offer experimental psychologists a rich modal system in which cognition, development, and enculturation can be studied. Here, we present a cross-cultural experiment concerning implicit knowledge of musical scales. Five groups of participants—American musicians and nonmusicians, Turkish musicians and nonmusicians, and Turkish classical and folk music listeners—were asked to listen to brief melodies composed using the member tones of either the major scale or the (...) rast makam, a microtonal mode found within Turkish classical and folk genres with no equivalent in Western music. Following each melody, participants were asked to identify whether a probe tone had been presented in the melody, providing confidence ratings on a six-point scale. In general, participants’ short-term memory was influenced by implicit knowledge of musical scales, with the major scale eclipsing the rast makam even in listeners experienced with Turkish genres. Prior work and future directions in cross-cultural music cognition research are discussed. (shrink)

Ten cerebellar patients were compared to 10 control subjects on a verbal working memory task in which the phonological similarity of the words to be remembered and their modality of presentation were manipulated. Cerebellar patients demonstrated a reduction of the phonological similarity effect relative to controls. Further, this reduction did not depend systematically upon the presentation modality. These results first document that qualitative differences in verbal working memory may be observed following cerebellar damage, indicating altered cognitive processing, even though behavioral (...) output as measured by the digit span may be within normal limits. However, the results also present problems for the hypothesis that the cerebellar role is specifically associated with articulatory rehearsal as conceptualized in the Baddeley–Hitch model of working memory. (shrink)

Three neuropsychological experiments on a group of 16 cerebellar patients and 16 age- and education-matched controls investigated the effects of damage to the cerebellum on English grammatical morphology across production, comprehension, and grammaticality judgment tasks. In Experiment 1, participants described a series of pictures previously used in studies of cortical aphasic patients. The cerebellar patients did not differ significantly from the controls in the total number of words produced or in the proportion of closed-class words. They did differ to a (...) marginally significant extent in the production of required articles. In Experiment 2, participants identified the agent in a series of aurally presented sentences in which three agency cues (subject–verb agreement, word order, and noun animacy) were manipulated. The cerebellar patients were less affected than the controls were by the manipulation of subject–verb agreement to a marginally significant extent. In Experiment 3, participants performed a grammaticality judgment task on a series of aurally presented sentences. The cerebellar patients were significantly less able to discriminate grammatical and ungrammatical sentences than the controls were, particularly when the error was of subject–verb agreement as opposed to word order. The results suggest that damage to the cerebellum can result in subtle impairments in the use of grammatical morphology, and are discussed in light of hypothesized roles for the cerebellum in language. (shrink)

We review evidence from neuropsychological studies of patients with damage to the cerebellum that suggests cerebellar involvement in four general categories of cognition: (1) speech and language; (2) temporal processing; (3) implicit learning and memory; (4) visuospatial processing and attention. A relatively strong case can be made for cerebellar contributions to language (including speech perception, lexical retrieval, and working memory) and to temporal processing. However, the evidence concerning cerebellar involvement in non-motor implicit learning and visuospatial processing is more equivocal. We (...) argue that cerebellar contributions to cognition are computationally plausible, given its reciprocal connectivity with the cerebral cortex, and suggest that this function of the cerebellum may be an example of an evolutionary process by which mechanisms originally evolved for one function (in this case, motor control) are adapted to other functions (cognition). (shrink)

It has been suggested that damage to anterior regions of the left hemisphere results in a dissociation in the perception and lexical activation of past-tense forms. Specifically, in a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets, such patients demonstrate significant priming for irregular verbs (spoke–speak), but, unlike control participants, fail to do so for regular verbs (looked–look). Here, this behavioral dissociation was first confirmed in a group of eleven patients with damage to the pars opercularis (BA 44) (...) and pars triangularis (BA 45) of the left inferior frontal gyrus (i.e., Broca's area). Two conditions containing word-onset orthographic–phonological overlap (bead–bee, barge–bar) demonstrated that the disrupted regular-verb priming was accompanied by, and covaried with, disrupted ortho-phonological priming, regardless of whether prime stimuli contained the regular inflectional rhyme pattern. Further, the dissociation between impaired regular-verb and preserved irregular-verb priming was shown to be continuous rather than categorical; priming for weak-irregular verbs (spent–spend) was intermediate in size between that of regular verbs and strong verbs. Such continuous dissociations grounded in ortho-phonological relationships between present- and past-tense forms are predicted by single-system, connectionist approaches to inflectional morphology and not predicted by current dual-system, rule-based models. Event-related potential data demonstrated that N400 priming effects were intact for both regular and irregular verbs, suggesting that the absence of significant regular-verb priming in the response time data did not result from a disruption of lexical access, and may have stemmed instead from post-lexical events such as covert articulation, segmentation strategies, and/or cognitive control. (shrink)

The Significance of Terminology for the Idea of a Historical Period – Considerations on Frühe Neuzeit/Early Modern. This article focuses on the relationship between the names given to historical periods and the attributed substance of that period. It argues that the possibility of a neutralisation in terms of substantive meaning depends on the terminology used to delineate a historical period. Considering the example of ‘early modern history’ the article sketches the usage of that term in twentieth century historiography. While it (...) is clear that the concept cannot escape the inherent teleology of modernity succeeding pre‐modern ages, the analysis shows that historians have used ‘early modern’ in surprisingly divers ways trying to overcome the semantic meaning of the term itself. (shrink)

Postural instability marks a prevalent symptom of Parkinson’s disease. It often manifests in increased body sway, which is commonly assessed by tracking the Center of Pressure. Yet, in terms of postural control, the body’s Center of Mass, and not CoP is what is regulated in a gravitational field. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of early- to mid-stage PD on these measures of postural control in response to unpredictable visual perturbations. We investigated three cohorts: 18 patients (...) with early to mid-stage PD [Hoehn & Yahr stage ; 1.94 ± 0.70]; a group of 15 age-matched controls ; and a group of 12 young healthy adults. Participants stood on a force plate to track their CoP, while the movement of their entire body was recorded with a video-based motion tracking system to monitor their CoM. A moving room paradigm was applied through a head-mounted virtual reality headset. The stimulus consisted of a virtual tunnel that stretched in the anterior-posterior direction which either remained static or moved back and forth in an unpredictable fashion.We found differences in mean sway amplitude and mean velocities of CoP and CoM between the groups under both conditions, with higher MSA of CoP and CoM for PD and higher mean velocities of both variables for PD and ECT when compared with YCT. Visual perturbation increased mean CoP velocity in all groups but did not have effects on mean CoM velocity or MSA. While being significantly lower for the young adults, the net effect of visual perturbation on mean CoP velocity was similar between patients with PD and age-matched controls. There was no effect of the visual perturbation on mean CoM velocity for any of the groups.Our simultaneous assessment of CoP and CoM revealed that postural control is reflected differently in CoM and CoP. As the motion of CoM remained mostly unaffected, all groups successfully counteracted the perturbation and maintained their balance. Higher CoP velocity for PD and ECT revealed increased corrective motion needed to achieve this, which however was similar in both groups. Thus, our results suggest increased effort, expressed in CoP velocity, to be an effect of age rather than disease in earlier stages of PD. (shrink)