scholarly journals A phone in a basket looks like a knife in a cup: The perception of abstract relations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alon Hafri ◽  
Michael F. Bonner ◽  
Barbara Landau ◽  
Chaz Firestone

The world contains not only objects and features, but also relations between them. When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. How does the mind represent relations themselves, separately from the objects participating in them? Though abstraction of this sort is frequently studied within the domains of language and higher-level reasoning, here we show that abstract relations may also arise in automatic visual processing, by exploring a surprising perceptual “error” that such relations can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in force- dynamic relations — e.g., a phone contained inside a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting inside a cup. Participants’ task was to respond to a single target image (e.g., phone-in- basket) within the stream of distractors. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images that matched the target’s relational category than to those that did not — even when such images involved completely different objects. In other words, when participants were searching for a phone in a basket, they were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments using this “image confusion” paradigm ruled out strategic responding, and also controlled for various image features that may have been confounded with these relations. We suggest that relational properties are automatically extracted by the mind, and in ways that are abstract: We see relations themselves, beyond the identities of the objects participating in them.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
João Diogo Silva ◽  
Antonio Cruz-Ferreira ◽  
Carlos Alberto Fontes Ribeiro ◽  
Luiz Miguel Santiago

Introduction: Rugby Sevens is one of the fastest growing sports in the world, especially the sevens variant after its inclusion in the Summer Olympics’ programme. The Portuguese University Sevens Championship is an amateur tournament that takes place every year. Objectives: To gather a set of relevant data regarding the profile of the Portuguese university rugby sevens’ players, as well as the epidemiology of injuries at this level of competition. Methodology: Firstly, an observational study was conducted to collect data regarding each player anthropometry, individual experience, training habits and warm-up routines. Secondly, a prospective cohort study including all participating athletes was conducted, to identify and describe all injuries occurring during the competition. A follow-up period until the return to sport from all injured players was conducted. Results: A total of 87 players from 8 teams competed in the tournament. On average, athlete’s heighted 178.6 cm (± 6.65) and weighted 83.34 kg (± 11.22). Total match exposure was 53.67 player match-hours and the injury incidence rate was 186.2 per 1000 player match-hours (94.7-332.4, CI 95%). Average severity was 26.6 days (± 6.23). Most injuries occurred on the second half (n=6), following contact events with the opponent (n=8). Lower limb (n=6) and joint/ligament (n=7) injuries were the most frequent. Discussion: The overall injury incidence rate was higher than any previously reported in the literature. Insufficient training and warm-up routines of the injured players strengthens the idea that these are key elements in injury prevention. The small sample limits the results' statistical significance. Conclusions: Similar but larger studies must be conducted to gain better knowledge of the individual profile of the Portuguese university rugby player and the burden of injuries at this level of competition.


Author(s):  
M. K. Kremenchutska ◽  
І. V. Dobrynina

Problem statement. It is shown that the main scientific vectors of the study of the personality image of the future can be considered philosophical, sociological, psychophysiological and psychological. In psychology, the future is revealed as a property of the mental. It is determined that the psychological phenomenology of the image of the future is that it is a holistic view of the individual about the future. It is in the mind and constantly affects behavior, activities, and its emotional state. The ability of an individual to construct his own future is due to the peculiarities of his individual psychological representations. This aspect is little studied in psychological science.  The purpose of the article is to present methods and techniques of research of representations and designing the world image of the future by the person. Results of the research. It is noted that the process of forming the image of the future is not only a vision of the end result, but also the impact on the assessment of behavior, consolidation of moral, volitional, intellectual efforts to realize their own expectations. This emphasizes the subjective nature of this process. In the framework of the research of mental representations and the peculiarities of constructing personality images of the future in a particular individual context were identified the mediative and moderative components that influence this phenomenon. The author’s method of assessing the world image of the future is presented. It is a technique of subjective scaling — that is, it shows how the individual imagines his future. To assess the relationship between the studied indicators, which are operationalized as concepts of psychosemantic analysis, a multidimensional deployment was used. Conclusions and prospects for further research. It is concluded that the psychosemantic approach is the most informative in the identified abilities of the individual to construct images of their own future. It is noted that the prospects for further research will be to identify the re lationship between forms and strategies for building mental representations of the image of the future with strategies for individual behavior in difficult life situations.


Semiotica ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (214) ◽  
Author(s):  
Algirdas J. Greimas ◽  
Paul Perron

AbstractThis lecture delivered at Victoria College, University of Toronto, concentrates on defining the status to be accorded to any universals. Underlining his desire that semiotics avoid epistemological dissensions and focus instead on establishing its effectiveness, Greimas recalls that he has adopted an “agnostic” constructivist stance and thus declined to affirm whether universals exist in the world or only in the mind. Following Hjelmslev’s middle way, he has identified a set of undefinable terms, then employed them to define each other in a coherent deductive axiomatic. Empirically, he distinguishes different kinds of universals. Absolutely necessary such terms include the interdependent concepts of description and relation. He further distinguishes between paradigmatic and syntagmatic universals. The former notably include the elementary category of the collective semantic universe, nature-culture, and that of the individual semantic universe, life-death. For his fundamental syntactic universal, Greimas declined to adopt the traditional propositional form comprising subject, copula, and predicate, and has opted instead for an alternative featuring a verbal kernel to which are articulated actants defined through grammatical cases. Semiotics identifies these and other hypothetical universals as metalinguistic terms which describe language and other systems of representation, and which define the conditions of their production and comprehension. In contrast to narratology, semiotics thus situates narrative universals within a comprehensive theory of meaning, with a goal to develop the bases of the human sciences in a manner parallel to the foundations of the life sciences.


2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 305
Author(s):  
Mark Loane

?MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY? was a system which relied upon sport to allow people to grow in a moral and spiritual way along with their physical development. It was thought that . . . in the playing field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance, but, better still temper, self restraint, fairness, honor, unenvious approbation of another?s success, and all that ?give and take? of life which stand a man in good stead when he goes forth into the world, and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and partial [Kingsley cited from Haley, in Watson et al].1 This system of thought held that a man?s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes [Hughes, cited in Watson et al].1 The body . . . [is] . . . a vehicle by which through gesture the soul could speak [Blooomfield, cited in Watson et al].1 In the 1800s there was a strong alignment of Muscular Christianity and the game of Rugby: If the Muscular Christians and their disciples in the public schools, given sufficient wit, had been asked to invent a game that exhausted boys before they could fall victims to vice and idleness, which at the same time instilled the manly virtues of absorbing and inflicting pain in about equal proportions, which elevated the team above the individual, which bred courage, loyalty and discipline, which as yet had no taint of professionalism and which, as an added bonus, occupied 30 boys at a time instead of a mere twenty two, it is probably something like rugby that they would have devised. [Dobbs, cited in Watson et al]1 The idea of Muscular Christianity came from the Greek ideals of athleticism that comprise the development of an excellent mind contained within an excellent body. Plato stated that one must avoid exercising either the mind or body without the other to preserve an equal and healthy balance between the two.


Perichoresis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Aurelian Botica

Abstract One of the most important paradigm shifts in the history of Greek philosophy was the ‘rediscovery’ of transcendence in the movement of Intermediate Platonism. Less than a century before the birth of Hellenism (late 4th century BC), Plato had advocated an intentional preoccupation with the life of the mind / soul, encouraging the individual to avoid being entrapped in the material limitations of life and instead discover its transcendental dimension. The conquest of Athens by the Macedonians, followed by the invasion of the Orient by Alexander the Great, set in motion sociological and cultural changes that challenged the relevance of Platonic philosophy. The transcendental vision of Platonism left the individual still struggling to find happiness in the world created by Alexander the Great. This was the context in which the schools the of Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism challenged Platonism with their call to happiness in this world and by means of the Hellenistic dominance and the rise of Roman supremacy stirred a renewed spiritual and philosophical effort to rediscover the world beyond; that is, the transcendental world of Plato. This was Middle Platonism and the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria was one of its most prolific writers. In this paper, we will examine the concept of the soul in the writings of Philo, with an emphasis on the role that the soul plays in the act of approaching God through the means of the external / material cult (Temple, sacrifices, priests, etc.). Philo offers a complex vision of the soul, one that remains critically relevant to understanding the Greek, Jewish, and Christian thought that emerged after Philo.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-32
Author(s):  
SVETLANA VOLKOVA

The article focuses on the little-studied interrelationship between the human way of being and education. The goal of the study is twofold. First, it is to reconstruct the image of the individual that lies at the basis of the scholars’ worldview. Secondly, it is to develop a model of philosophy that would correspond to this image and correlate with the problems and challenges of modern education. Drawing attention to the widespread use of information and electronic technologies in education, the author argues that the model of human being as embodied presence (embodiment) is very important for pedagogical activities. The significance of this model is that it enables to distinguish the meaning-making dimension of human consciousness so needed by contemporary education. The author demonstrates that an individual sees and cognizes the world not so much with the organs that are available and ready, but rather with those that are constituted in the acts of reflexing. Meaning, therefore, is the reflexive functional organ that reproduces the substance of the personality of a human being as a student. The author also notes that the perception and comprehension of the world is carried out from the perspectives of both the “pure” and the embodied mind. Thus, one of the main tasks of education is to engage and reveal the mind-body system as a source of the subject’s meaning-making activity. So, orienting education towards the individual as a being who does not possess meanings but searches for them will succeed only if the human being is viewed as an integral whole rather than as separate parts. The author concludes that both philosophy and pedagogy need to develop educational anthropology, an interdisciplinary area that would explore the subject of education in the integrity of their three dimensions – mind, body and language, taken as sources of creating meanings.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 142-151
Author(s):  
Larisa N Fedotova

The problem of visualization characteristic of TV and street advertising, is utterly relevant, as the follow-up of cultural and artistic origins of any new information technology helps to present potential of the creative perception of social reality historically engendering both forms of art and their artistic palette. Visualization of goods, that is demonstration them to its customers is the first phase of the exchange, and it is only foreshadowed advertising. When production becomes ponderous, information about goods should become regular, inclusive, and possibly aggressive. A wide-scale consumer boasts of increase of the number of social needs. In the course of time exhortations system has complicated to a larger extent, and their form become more diverse. Nowadays exhortation exists as a potential conclusion after reading the text. The advertising message may consist of a simple statement of some information about the offer: but it may also show. Demonstration can promote a positive attitude to the product. The heyday of this practice we can see on TV. Due to power of its pictorial capacities it shows the world in all its beauty. It just shows the power of using the product demonstration process. And most importantly - since the image might be hiding, or it reflects the pattern of life, - even a whole philosophy of life. This is the model of any symbolization - from details to the total, from the individual to the whole universe. TV used this mechanism in such mode of advertising as the celebrities marketing. The figure of the hero is symbolic, consumption becomes synonymous with success, achievement. Sometimes visualization of ideas have problems with limits symbolization (the example of the TVC Daisy). This problem becomes more urgent nowadays because the marketing communications based on unfounded statements do not work anymore. The strength of the latter particularly manifested itself under the crisis.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Leshinskaya ◽  
Mira Bajaj ◽  
Sharon L. Thompson-Schill

Knowledge of predictive relations is a core aspect of learning. Beyond individual relations, we also represent intuitive theories of the world, which include interrelated sets of relations. We asked whether individual predictive relations learned incidentally in the same context become automatically associatively bound and whether they influence later learning. Participants performed a cover task while watching three sequences of events. Each sequence contained the same set of events, but differed in how the events related to each other. The first two sequences each had two strong predictive relations (R1 & R2, and R3 & R4). The third contained either a consistent pairing of relations (R1 & R2) or an inconsistent pairing (R1 & R3). We found that participants’ learning of the individual relations in the third sequence was affected by pairing consistency, suggesting the mind associates relations to each other as part of the intrinsic way it learns about the world. This was despite participants’ minimal ability to verbally describe most of the relations they had learned. Thus, participants spontaneously developed the expectation that pairs of relations should cohere, and this affected their ability to learn new evidence. Such associative binding of relational information may help us build intuitive theories.


Slavic Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Ross Bullock

This article explores the prominent role played by visual tropes in Andrei Platonov's Turkmen novella,Dzhan(Soul). While acknowledging Platonov's literary inventiveness, it seeks to identify the equal importance of the gaze as a means of emotional and ideological cognition, thereby arguing that the shift in emphasis in his prose in the mid-1930s entailed not just a move away from explicitly linguistic experimentation but also a greater embrace of visual imagery. With reference to bothDzhanand the author's letters and notebooks, this essay examines how the geographical relocation to Central Asia is accompanied by a heightened engagement with the world through the gaze, which functions principally in terms of gender and national identity. It concludes with a consideration of how the gaze is integral to a theory of Platonov's understanding of language, arguing that the “situatedness” of the individual is predicated on his or her being seen in a visual context by an interlocutor.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Pticina

John Fowles’ literary opus is largely based on the philosophy of existentialism, with the motifs of freedom and suicide serving as its focal points, both closely related to freedom of choice and seen as crucial to the existentialist movement, as well as the author himself. This paper analyses Fowles’ novel The Magus through the prism of existentialism, which means that the basic existentialist concepts are identified and located within its text, as well as the influences of the key figures of this movement. The motifs of freedom and freedom of choice in context are interpreted and linked to the theories of Freud and Jung while special emphasis is placed on the role of the anima, that is, the female principle inside the male subconsciousness. This is precisely why a separate section of this paper is dedicated to female protagonists and their role in the novel. In his works, Fowles puts an emphasis on the freedom of the individual, which is portrayed through the freedom of the mind, ideas, choice and spirit. It is cruel, always demanding action as well as acceptance and adaptation. By remodelling our own character, we also remodel the future generations and our visions of the world. The protagonist in this novel is chosen to remodel his own character, to turn from a collector into a creator, to stop depriving people of the content and to bring about a positive creative act instead. Human border acts such as suicide also belong to this field of interest. There are three cases of suicide in The Magus and this paper analyses their role as a symbol of the protagonist’s metamorphosis upon threading onto the mythical ground.


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