Simulating the ‘Other-Race’ Effect with Autoassociative Neural Networks: Further Evidence in Favor of the Face-Space Model

Perception ◽  
10.1068/p5360 ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 659-670 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Caldara ◽  
Hervé Abdi

Other-race (OR) faces are less accurately recognized than same-race (SR) faces, but faster classified by race. This phenomenon has often been reported as the ‘other-race’ effect (ORE). Valentine (1991 Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human Experimental Psychology43 161–204) proposed a theoretical multidimensional face-space model that explained both of these results, in terms of variations in exemplar density between races. According to this model, SR faces are more widely distributed across the dimensions of the space than OR faces. However, this model does not quantify nor state the dimensions coded within this face space. The aim of the present study was to test the face-space explanation of the ORE with neural network simulations by quantifying its dimensions. We found the predicted density properties of Valentine's framework in the face-projection spaces of the autoassociative memories. This was supported by an interaction for exemplar density between the race of the learned face set and the race of the faces. In addition, the elaborated face representations showed optimal responses for SR but not for OR faces within SR face spaces when explored at the individual level, as gender errors occurred significantly more often in OR than in SR face-space representations. Altogether, our results add further evidence in favor of a statistical exemplar density explanation of the ORE as suggested by Valentine, and question the plausibility of such coding for faces in the framework of recent neuroimaging studies.

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-313
Author(s):  
Claire Farago

Abstract Five interrelated case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries develop the dynamic contrast between portraiture and pictorial genres newly invented in and about Latin America that do not represent their subjects as individuals despite the descriptive focus on the particular. From Jean de Léry’s genre-defining proto-ethnographic text (1578) about the Tupinamba of Brazil to the treatment of the Creole upper class in New Spain as persons whose individuality deserves to be memorialized in contrast to the Mestizaje, African, and Indian underclass objectified as types deserving of scientific study, hierarchical distinctions between portraiture and ethnographic images can be framed in historical terms around the Aristotelian categories of the universal, the individual, and the particular. There are also some intriguing examples that destabilize these inherited distinctions, such as Puerto Rican artist José Campeche’s disturbing and poignant image of a deformed child, Juan Pantaléon Aviles, 1808; and an imaginary portrait of Moctezuma II, c. 1697, based on an ethnographic image, attributed to the leading Mexican painter Antonio Rodriguez. These anomalies serve to focus the study on the hegemonic position accorded to the viewing subject as actually precarious and unstable, always ripe for reinterpretation at the receiving end of European culture.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 816-826 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilad Feldman ◽  
Huiwen Lian ◽  
Michal Kosinski ◽  
David Stillwell

There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes and are often considered to be positively related. On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty. In three studies, we explored the relationship between profanity and honesty. We examined profanity and honesty first with profanity behavior and lying on a scale in the lab (Study 1; N = 276), then with a linguistic analysis of real-life social interactions on Facebook (Study 2; N = 73,789), and finally with profanity and integrity indexes for the aggregate level of U.S. states (Study 3; N = 50 states). We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and with higher integrity at the society level.


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-164
Author(s):  
Amy Kaler ◽  
John Parkins ◽  
Robin Willey

In this study, we examine the experience of international Christian humanitarian aid workers and who work in South Sudan. From interviews with thirty people in east Africa and north America, we derive a relationship between Christianity as our participants understand it, and their modalities of encountering “the other” – the people of South Sudan, who may seem different and unfamiliar, yet who must be met as part of religiously motivated life and work. In terrain of South Sudan, we argue that our participants enact a theopolitics of recognition, in which their emotional and practical connections to the people they serve are triangulated through God. This theopolitics operates almost entirely at the individual level, as personal encounters and work are mediated by the assumption of a shared relationship to God. The people of South Sudan are recognized as both familiar and strange, because they share a posited connection to the divine with humanitarians from the global north. We argue that this recognition is different from other ways of encountering the other found in literature ranging from feminist theory to international development. This study thus adds to scholarly knowledge of faith-based organizations and global humanitarianism. We also argue that while the theopolitical modality makes possible certain kinds of ethical action, it may close off other forms of action based in broader political critiques of global relations of power.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maren Wehrle

AbstractPhenomenologically speaking, one can consider the experiencing body as normative insofar as it generates norms through repeated actions and interactions, crystallizing into habits. On the other hand according to Foucauldian approaches, the subjective body does not generate norms but is itself produced by norms: Dominant social norms are incorporated via repeated practices of discipline. How is the individual level of habit formation in phenomenology related to this embodiment of supra-individual norms? In what sense can we differentiate between a habit formation that results in a skill and one that disciplines a body? To address these questions the paper will analyze examples of the embodiment of norms in Foucault and feminist philosophy and show how they rely on the phenomenological concept of the actual and habitual body.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Lingelbach

Actors at the wealth–power nexus—oligarchs, cronies, plutocrats, and the like—have become increasingly consequential in the global economic, political, and organizational landscapes. Yet, we know little about them, especially the processes by which they gain wealth or power, and then transform one into the other. I suggest that one reason for our limited understanding is that we are prisoners of Aristotle’s conceptualization of them as groups. To break out of that prison, a turn to the individual level seems warranted. This turn opens up new theoretical perspectives that focus on individuals and their processes, including effectuation, process research, biology and neuroscience, and arts and literature. These perspectives put individual-level processes front and center in the uncertain contexts in which these actors create and transform wealth and power.


2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (6) ◽  
pp. 1103-1118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah V. Stevenage ◽  
Elizabeth A. Lee ◽  
Nick Donnelly

Two experiments are reported to test the proposition that facial familiarity influences processing on a face classification task. Thatcherization was used to generate distorted versions of familiar and unfamiliar individuals. Using both a 2AFC (which is “odd”?) task to pairs of images (Experiment 1) and an “odd/normal” task to single images (Experiment 2), results were consistent and indicated that familiarity with the target face facilitated the face classification decision. These results accord with the proposal that familiarity influences the early visual processing of faces. Results are evaluated with respect to four theoretical developments of Valentine's (1991) face-space model, and can be accommodated with the two models that assume familiarity to be encoded within a region of face space.


Africa ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzette Heald

AbstractThe literature has tended to deal with diviners only where they have been seen to play a notable role in the transformation of social relationships. This leads us to overlook their relative social invisibility in many African societies. Yet we may gain insight into the rise of prophets and charismatic healers by looking at the other side of this story in the multitude of very humble practitioners plying their trade. This is the context in which this article explores the role of diviners among the Gisu of Uganda.The privacy of consultation, the search for distant diviners, the way they are approached only at times of crisis and as agents of private counteraction or vengeance, go some way towards explaining why it is difficult for diviners to gain recognition. Added to which are the difficulties of another order which relate to what might here be regarded as divinatory success. For divination may be seen to fail at a number of different levels: in the lack of credibility of a given practitioner, i n a lack of unanimity among those consulted and in the multiplicity of causal agents evoked.An argument put forward here is that scepticism is endemic to the system and, possibly, distinctive to it. We should ask not, as Evans-Pritchard did, how belief i s sustained despite the presence of scepticism but what it is about these beliefs which encourages scepticism. It is not useful to explore this issue in terms of the rationality question or the ‘truth’ of belief systems. If we are to draw a comparison with modern attitudes, of greater significance are the organisation and differentiation of knowledge and its relationship to power. It is suggested that diagnostic systems used by societies such as the Gisu encourage an agnostic attitude in a way i n which those of the modern West do not.In the final part of the article the social role of divination is reconsidered and some of the positive functions proposed for it are questioned. Gisu divination can be seen to have evolved into a very narrow niche whose parameters are bound, on the one hand, by the limits of belief and, on the other, by a system of interpersonal vengeance. We may say that the socially marginal attributes of diviners, exclusively concerned with the negative aspects of social relationships, represent a real social marginality. At best they are agents by which the individual may be reconciled with harshnesses imposed by his own destiny, of ancestral affliction; at worst they are agents of individual vengeance and retribution. This may be taken as more or less disqualifying them from articulating a positive, future-oriented vision on behalf of the community. Clearly it is not impossible but it is a huge jump from these humble practitioners, interpreting the present in terms of the past and trading evil with evil at an individual level, to prophets capable of formulating a positive social vision, a means forward, on behalf of a wider moral or social community.


1978 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Raday

On two notable occasions in the past two years, it was found necessary to use legislation in order to buttress the potency of general collective agreements. The first of these occasions was when legislation was used to give overriding legal force to a general collective agreement between the Histadrut and the Government incorporating the tax reform recommendations of the Ben Shachar Committee. The second was a similar use of legislation with regard to the general collective agreement between the Histadrut and the Government incorporating the special increments recommendations of the Barkai Committee. The two collective agreements concerned shared one important quality: They both purported to derogate from rights previously enjoyed by employees under existing collective agreements. One of the reasons for legislative intervention to support these agreements was the existence of doubt as to the legal effectiveness of their attempt to derogate from the individual employees' rights.The source of the doubt as to the legal effectiveness of such agreements lies in the existence of two distinct levels at which a collective agreement functions: the collective and the individual levels. At the collective level, conditions are determined by the collective bargaining parties, the employer or employers' organisation on one hand and the employees' organisation on the other; at this level, the collective agreement is a consensual arrangement between the parties to it, the parties fix the terms and have a contractual right to demand their enforcement. The terms fixed at the collective level take effect, however, also at the individual level; the individual employees of an employer bound by the agreement are both bound by the agreement and entitled to enjoy the rights bestowed by the agreement. The Collective Agreements Law gives forceful expression to the effect of the collective agreement's personal provisions at the individual level, giving them immediate and mandatory effect as part of each individual employee's employment contract.


2020 ◽  
pp. 106939712097957
Author(s):  
Peter B. Smith ◽  
Matthew J. Easterbrook ◽  
Yasin Koc ◽  
Vivian Miu-Chi Lun ◽  
Dona Papastylianou ◽  
...  

This study compares the individual-level and sample-level predictive utility of a measure of the cultural logics of dignity, honor, and face. University students in 29 samples from 24 nations used a simple measure to rate their perceptions of the interpersonal cultural logic characterizing their local culture. The nomological net of these measures was then explored. Key dependent measures included three different facets of independent versus interdependent self-construal, relevant attitudes and values, reported handling of actual interpersonal conflicts, and responses to normative settings. Multilevel analyses revealed both individual- and sample-level effects but the dignity measure showed more individual-level effects, whereas sample-level effects were relatively more important with the face measure. The implications of this contrast are discussed.


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