scholarly journals Face Specific vs. Expertise Hypotheses: Insights into the Underlying Mechanisms of Face Processing in Prosopagnosia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sumaya Lamb

<p>A prominent debate in visual perception centers on the nature of mechanisms underlying face processing. One side of this debate argues that faces are processed by specialised mechanisms that are not involved in any form of object processing. By contrast, the other side argues that faces are processed by generic mechanisms common to all objects for which we are experts. To distinguish between these two hypotheses, I investigated whether participants with impaired face processing (developmental prosopagnosia) can acquire expertise with novel objects called greebles. To do so, I recruited 10 developmental prosopagnosics and 10 neurotypical control participants. All participants completed a standard training program for developing expertise with greebles, as well as two similar training programs with upright faces and inverted faces. Prosopagnosics were able to acquire expertise with greebles to the same extent as controls but were impaired when learning upright faces. These results demonstrate that deficits for face processing in individuals with prosopagnosia are dissociated from their ability to gain expertise with objects. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that face processing relies on specialised mechanisms, rather than generic expertise mechanisms. Despite their deficits, though, prosopagnosics still showed some evidence of learning with upright faces and showed better learning with upright faces than inverted faces. These findings suggest that prosopagnosics have face-specific mechanisms that are somewhat functional, and that training could be a useful rehabilitation tool in developmental prosopagnosia. Finally, I found substantial heterogeneity among the patterns of performance of the prosopagnosics, suggesting that further investigations into the subtypes of prosopagnosia are warranted.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sumaya Lamb

<p>A prominent debate in visual perception centers on the nature of mechanisms underlying face processing. One side of this debate argues that faces are processed by specialised mechanisms that are not involved in any form of object processing. By contrast, the other side argues that faces are processed by generic mechanisms common to all objects for which we are experts. To distinguish between these two hypotheses, I investigated whether participants with impaired face processing (developmental prosopagnosia) can acquire expertise with novel objects called greebles. To do so, I recruited 10 developmental prosopagnosics and 10 neurotypical control participants. All participants completed a standard training program for developing expertise with greebles, as well as two similar training programs with upright faces and inverted faces. Prosopagnosics were able to acquire expertise with greebles to the same extent as controls but were impaired when learning upright faces. These results demonstrate that deficits for face processing in individuals with prosopagnosia are dissociated from their ability to gain expertise with objects. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that face processing relies on specialised mechanisms, rather than generic expertise mechanisms. Despite their deficits, though, prosopagnosics still showed some evidence of learning with upright faces and showed better learning with upright faces than inverted faces. These findings suggest that prosopagnosics have face-specific mechanisms that are somewhat functional, and that training could be a useful rehabilitation tool in developmental prosopagnosia. Finally, I found substantial heterogeneity among the patterns of performance of the prosopagnosics, suggesting that further investigations into the subtypes of prosopagnosia are warranted.</p>


Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Epongse Nkealah ◽  
Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji

Ideas of nationalisms as masculine projects dominate literary texts by African male writers. The texts mirror the ways in which gender differentiation sanctions nationalist discourses and in turn how nationalist discourses reinforce gender hierarchies. This article draws on theoretical insights from the work of Anne McClintock and Elleke Boehmer to analyse two plays: Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon by Bole Butake and Gilbert Doho and Hard Choice by Sunnie Ododo. The article argues that women are represented in these two plays as having an ambiguous relationship to nationalism. On the one hand, women are seen actively changing the face of politics in their societies, but on the other hand, the means by which they do so reduces them to stereotypes of their gender.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Patrícia Silva

The book Research on Curricula and Cultures: tensions, movements and creations, organized by Marlucy Alves Paraíso and Maria Patrícia Silva, it consists of 17 chapters, one of which is an interesting work by a Canadian scholar who investigates state anti-feminism. The other chapters bring results from 16 researches developed by researchers from the Study and Research Group on Curricula and Cultures (GECC), created and coordinated by Marlucy Alves Paraíso, which has researchers from several Brazilian universities and states. The articles in the book combine the post-critical perspectives used to investigate curricula and cultures in their different nuances, addressing silences, power relations, modes of subjectivation and the movements that prevent their fixity. The book brings research results that discuss the possibilities of creating possibilities at school and in other cultural spaces that also have curricula and develop pedagogies, such as: cyberspace, city, health care programs, teacher training programs, educational policies, etc. In addition, curricula are investigated with emphasis on different practices and aspects: childhood, art, music, dance, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, corporality, politics, with research that also innovates methodologically when operating with openings, experiments, do-it-yourself and compositions in different ways. to research curricula without rigidity, although with the necessary rigor in academic research. O livro reconhece de diferentes modos as possibilidades de conexões entre currículos e culturas, e mostra movimentos capazes de operar transgressões apostando em uma cultura porvir.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Maria Felisberti

Visual field asymmetries (VFA) in the encoding of groups rather than individual faces has been rarely investigated. Here, eye movements (dwell time (DT) and fixations (Fix)) were recorded during the encoding of three groups of four faces tagged with cheating, cooperative, or neutral behaviours. Faces in each of the three groups were placed in the upper left (UL), upper right (UR), lower left (LL), or lower right (LR) quadrants. Face recognition was equally high in the three groups. In contrast, the proportion of DT and Fix were higher for faces in the left than the right hemifield and in the upper rather than the lower hemifield. The overall time spent looking at the UL was higher than in the other quadrants. The findings are relevant to the understanding of VFA in face processing, especially groups of faces, and might be linked to environmental cues and/or reading habits.


Author(s):  
Hugh H. Benson
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

This chapter presents a reading of Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. These dialogues, in which Plato depicts the weeks leading up to Socrates’s last day, are replete with various philosophical explorations. Among those explorations is the question of how to live our lives. On the one hand, Socrates is clear and straightforward. We should live the examined life—making logoi and examining ourselves and others in order to determine whether we are as wise as we think we are, and we should live the virtuous life. This is how Socrates lives his life. On the other hand, the examined life undercuts, or at least should undercut, the confidence with which he seeks to live the virtuous life. It may help bring some stability to the general principles by which he lives his life, but it can do so only defeasibly and without certainty.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorota Reis ◽  
Alexander Hart ◽  
Dirk Lehr ◽  
Malte Friese

Abstract Background Work-related stress shows steadily increasing prevalence rates and has tangible consequences for individual workers, their organizations, and society as a whole. One mechanism that may help offset the negative outcomes of work-related stress on employees’ well-being is recovery. Recovery refers to the experience of unwinding from one's job when not at work. However, employees who experience high levels of work-related stress and are thus particularly in need of recovery tend to struggle to switch-off. Due to the detrimental effects of this prolonged and sustained mental representation of job stressors, interventions promoting recovery may contribute to improvements in employees' mental health. Methods In this randomized, waitlist controlled trial, we will investigate the effectiveness of two 6-week online training programs (cognitive behavioral and mindfulness-based). The sample will include employees working at least part-time during regular work hours. Besides the pre-post-follow-up assessments, the trial will include measurement bursts with the goal of examining the underlying mechanisms. We expect that both interventions will reduce work-related perseverative thinking (PT) compared with the waitlist control groups (primary outcome). Also, we expect that both interventions will result in similar improvements, but the underlying mechanisms will differ (process outcomes). In the cognitive-behavioral intervention group, we expect that the main mechanism responsible for lower PT levels will be an increase in recovery experiences across time. In the mindfulness-based group, we expect that the main mechanism responsible for lower PT levels will be an increase in facets of mindfulness across time. Discussion In the present study, we will investigate mechanisms underlying assumed changes in work-related PT in great detail. Besides evaluating the overall effectiveness of the two interventions in terms of pre-post-follow-up changes, we will look at the underlying processes at different levels—that is, within days, within weeks, across weeks, and between individuals. Accordingly, our study will offer a fine-grained approach to investigating potential determinants, mediators, and moderators of the processes that may, in the end, be responsible for work-related strain. From a public health perspective, if effective, the online training programs may offer valuable, low-threshold, and low-intensity interventions for a broad range of occupations. Trial registration German Clinical Trials Registration: DRKS00024933. Registered prospectively 7 April 2021. https://www.drks.de/drks_web/navigate.do?navigationId=trial.HTML&TRIAL_ID=DRKS00024933


2021 ◽  
pp. 136843022097903
Author(s):  
Alexander P. Landry ◽  
Elliott Ihm ◽  
Jonathan W. Schooler

Metadehumanization, the perception that members of an outgroup dehumanize your group, has been found to exacerbate intergroup conflict by inspiring reciprocal dehumanization of the offending outgroup. Moreover, metadehumanization is distinct from metaprejudice (i.e., the perception that an outgroup hates your group). Given the mutual animosity reported in public opinion polls toward the other side, we believed US–Russia relations would be a worthwhile context in which to extend this model. Therefore, we measured Americans’ levels of metadehumanization and metaprejudice of Russians to determine the association between these perceptions and their hostility toward Russians (Study 1). In this novel intergroup conflict, metadehumanization remained a consequential predictor of outgroup hostility over and above metaprejudice, suggesting that it can exacerbate a broader range of intergroup conflicts than those heretofore examined. Given these findings, we then sought to experimentally differentiate between metadehumanization and metaprejudice. In Study 2, we manipulated both metadehumanization and metaprejudice to (a) determine whether one or both cause greater outgroup hostility and (b) elucidate the underlying mechanisms by which they may produce this effect. Whereas metadehumanization produced greater hostility, metaprejudice did not. Moreover, although both metaperceptions inspired greater prejudice, only metadehumanization led to greater dehumanization. We conclude that metadehumanization may be a particularly potent fomenter of hostility because it inspires reciprocal dehumanization over and above more general negative bias.


1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jase R. Ramsey ◽  
Amine Abi Aad ◽  
Chuandi Jiang ◽  
Livia Barakat ◽  
Virginia Drummond

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to establish under which conditions researchers should use the constructs cultural intelligence (CQ) and global mindset (GM). The authors further seek to understand the process through which these constructs emerge to a higher level and link unit-level knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) capital to pertinent firm-level outcomes. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a conceptual study with a multilevel model. Findings This paper differentiates two similar lines of research occurring concordantly on the CQ and GM constructs. Next, the authors develop a multilevel model to better understand the process through which CQ and GM emerge at higher levels and their underlying mechanisms. Finally, this paper adds meaning to the firm-level KSAs by linking firm-level KSAs capital to pertinent firm-level outcomes. Research limitations/implications The conclusion implies that researchers should use CQ when the context is focused on interpersonal outcomes and GM when focused on strategic outcomes. The multilevel model is a useful tool for scholars to select which rubric to use in future studies that have international managers as the subjects. The authors argue that if the scholar is interested in an individual’s ability to craft policy and implement strategy, then GM may be more parsimonious than CQ. On the other hand, if the focus is on leadership, human resources or any other relationship dependent outcome, then CQ will provide a more robust measure. Practical implications For practitioners, this study provides a useful tool for managers to improve individual-level commitment by selecting and training individuals high in CQ. On the other hand, if the desired outcome is firm-level sales or performance, the focus should be on targeting individuals high in GM. Originality/value This is the first theoretical paper to examine how CQ and GM emerge to the firm level and describe when to use each measure.


2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 897-905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrés Martín-Asuero ◽  
Gloria García-Banda

This semi-experimental study examines how Mindfulness facilitates a distress reduction in a group of health professionals. The sample comprises 29 professionals seeking stress reduction who undertook an 8 weeks psico-educative intervention, involving 28 hours of class, based on a program called Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction or MBSR. Results show a 35% reduction of distress, from percentile 75 to 45, combined with a 30% reduction in rumination and a 20% decrease in negative affect. These benefits lasted during the 3 months of the follow up period. The correlation analysis indicates that the decrease in distress is significantly related to the other two variables. These results confirm the effectiveness of MBSR to decrease distress and its applicability in training programs for health professionals.


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