Mental representations of immigrants encode racialized expectations of socio-structural positions

Illegalized immigrants are mentally associated with specific visual expectations (e.g., dark-skinned threats) and classifications (e.g., Latin American, Syrian, poor, economic drains). However, these findings provide only partial accounts of how migrant illegality is represented: visual representations could shift depending on the various societal positions or categories illegalized immigrants occupy. We therefore introduce a factorial cross-categorical reverse correlation design where online participants (N = 480) visualized immigrants simultaneously associated with certain documentation statuses (documented or undocumented), economic circumstances (job or welfare), and nationalities (Mexican, Irish, Chinese, or Nigerian). The resulting images and evaluations by naïve samples (N = 345) highlighted that: 1) illegality is not always visually encoded as darker skin, 2) affective face expressions hint at racialized expectations of European vs. non-European immigrants’ societal positions in the U.S., and 3) disaggregation of a target category is critical for understanding the relationship between categorical and visual mental representations.

Category Congruence of Display-Only Products Influences Attention and Purchase Decisions

In e-commerce settings, shoppers can navigate to product-specific pages on which they are asked to make yes-or-no decisions about buying a particular item. Beyond that target, there are often other products displayed on the page, such as those suggested by the retailers’ recommendation systems, that can influence consumers’ buying behavior. We propose that display items that come from the same category as the target product (matched) may enhance target purchase by increasing the attractiveness of the presented opportunity. Contrasting this, mismatched display items may reduce purchase by raising awareness of opportunity costs. Eye-tracking was used to explore this framework by examining how different types of displays influenced visual attention. Although target purchase rates were higher for products with matched vs. mismatched displays, there was no difference in fixation time for the target images. However, participants attended to mismatched display items for more time than they did for matched ones consistent with the hypothesized processes. In addition, increases in display attractiveness increased target purchase, but only for matched items, in line with supporting the target category. Given the importance of relative attention and information in determining the impact of display items, we replicated the overall purchase effect across varying amounts of available display information in a second behavioral study. This demonstration of robustness supports the translational relevance of these findings for application in industry.

Construction of ‘socially marginalised Greenlanders’ as a target group in Danish welfare policy and practice

This paper examines the emergence of ‘socially marginalized Greenlanders’ as a distinct target category in Danish welfare policy and practice. It builds on analysis of policies targeting Greenlandic minorities in Denmark and interviews with welfare professionals in charge of implementing these. The paper shows how Greenlandic minorities are represented as characterized by markers of difference viewed to set them apart from other socially marginalized citizens. These relate to 1) structural differences that impact on the ability to receive and benefit from welfare services, 2) to the perceived cultural origins of the problems that socially marginalised Greenlanders face, and, finally, 3) to the excessive social problems associated in policies and by professionals with an upbringing in Greenland. The paper shows how policies and welfare professionals both reject and continuously resort to the notion of the target group as distinct from other socially marginalized citizens. In continuation of this, the analysis further shows how ambivalences and contradictions are not so much found between the levels of policy and practice, as other studies of policy implementation processes have demonstrated, as they are inherent within all policy and considerations about how to understand the target group they articulate.

Meanings within meanings: Skilled readers activate irrelevant meanings of radicals in Chinese

Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. The cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character’s meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman & Siok, 1999). We investigated whether readers automatically activate the semantics associated with a radical even when it is irrelevant to the character’s meaning, using a modified version of the Van Orden (1987) task. Fifty-one Mandarin speakers participated in the study. On each trial they were shown a reference category such as “animal” prior to seeing a target character then indicated whether the target character was a member of that category. Decisions were slower and less accurate when a target that is not a member of the target category contained a radical that is. For example, if the category is “found in the kitchen,” the answer for the target 券 (ticket) is no; however the character contains the misleading radical 刀 (knife). These patterns suggest that readers process the semantics of the radical even when it is not relevant to the meaning of the character. The results present challenges for theories in which whole characters are the units of processing in reading Chinese. They also raise questions as to whether repetitions of this experience may result in some of the irrelevant semantics influencing the meaning of the character.

Pristupi pojmovnoj metafori

This paper presents a set of possible contemporary approaches to the study of metaphor. Although undoubtedly most propulsive, Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual (or cognitive) metaphor theory is only one of several metaphor models. Conceptual metaphor theory postulates that metaphor is a phenomenon of thought which is manifest in language. According to this approach, metaphor is understanding abstract conceptual domains (where domain is any coherent organization of human experience) in terms of more concrete source domains. In Fauconnier and Turner’s blending theory meaning is constructed through building of a number of mental spaces and establishment of mappings between them. Contrary to these two approaches, in Glucksberg’s class-inclusion model of metaphor, properties of the source category are attributed to the target category not by means of mappings but through class inclusion. Bowdle and Gentner’s ‘career of metaphor’ theory highlights the importance of metaphor conventionality. In Cameron’s ‘discourse dynamics’ approach metaphor is explored through analysis of discourse. It is perceived and used as a tool which helps uncover attitudes and values. Relevance theorists, on the other end of the spectrum, see metaphor as ‘loose talk’ understood via pragmatic inferential processes. Critical metaphor analysis explores how metaphors shape not only human thought and language, but also our beliefs, values and actions. The range of available approaches to metaphor suggests that no single approach can exhaustively capture this multifaceted phenomenon.

Extending Landau-Ginzburg Models to the Point

We classify framed and oriented 2-1-0-extended TQFTs with values in the bicategories of Landau-Ginzburg models, whose objects and 1-morphisms are isolated singularities and (either $$\mathbb {Z}_2$$ Z 2 - or $$(\mathbb {Z}_2 \times \mathbb {Q})$$ ( Z 2 × Q ) -graded) matrix factorisations, respectively. For this we present the relevant symmetric monoidal structures and find that every object $$W\in \mathbb {k}[x_1,\dots ,x_n]$$ W ∈ k [ x 1 , ⋯ , x n ] determines a framed extended TQFT. We then compute the Serre automorphisms $$S_W$$ S W to show that W determines an oriented extended TQFT if the associated category of matrix factorisations is $$(n-2)$$ ( n - 2 ) -Calabi-Yau. The extended TQFTs we construct from W assign the non-separable Jacobi algebra of W to a circle. This illustrates how non-separable algebras can appear in 2-1-0-extended TQFTs, and more generally that the question of extendability depends on the choice of target category. As another application, we show how the construction of the extended TQFT based on $$W=x^{N+1}$$ W = x N + 1 given by Khovanov and Rozansky can be derived directly from the cobordism hypothesis.

How Proactive Interference during New Associative Learning Impacts General and Specific Memory in Young and Old

Some prior research has found that older adults are more susceptible to proactive interference than young adults. The current study investigated whether age-related deficits in pFC-mediated cognitive control processes that act to detect and resolve interference underlie increased susceptibility to proactive interference in an associative memory task. Young and older adults were scanned while tasked with remembering which associate (face or scene) objects were paired with most recently during study, under conditions of high, low, or no proactive interference. After scanning, participants' memory was tested for varying levels of episodic detail about the pairings (i.e., target category vs. specific target category vs. specific target associate). Young and older adults were similarly susceptible to proactive interference. Memory for both the general target category and the specific target associate worsened as the level of proactive interference increased, with no robust age differences. For both young and older adults, the left ventrolateral pFC, which has been indicated in controlled retrieval of goal-relevant conceptual representations, was sensitive to increasing levels of interference during encoding but was insensitive to associative memory accuracy. Consistent with the Compensation-Related Utilization of Neural Circuits Hypothesis model of cognitive aging, the ventromedial pFC, which is involved in the monitoring of internally generated information, was recruited more by older than young adults to support the successful retrieval of target–object pairs at lower levels of proactive interference. Collectively, these results suggest that some older adults are able to engage in the cognitive control processes necessary to resolve proactive interference to the same extent as young adults.

End-to-End Bootstrapping Neural Network for Entity Set Expansion

Bootstrapping for entity set expansion (ESE) has long been modeled as a multi-step pipelined process. Such a paradigm, unfortunately, often suffers from two main challenges: 1) the entities are expanded in multiple separate steps, which tends to introduce noisy entities and results in the semantic drift problem; 2) it is hard to exploit the high-order entity-pattern relations for entity set expansion. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end bootstrapping neural network for entity set expansion, named BootstrapNet, which models the bootstrapping in an encoder-decoder architecture. In the encoding stage, a graph attention network is used to capture both the first- and the high-order relations between entities and patterns, and encode useful information into their representations. In the decoding stage, the entities are sequentially expanded through a recurrent neural network, which outputs entities at each stage, and its hidden state vectors, representing the target category, are updated at each expansion step. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvement of our model over previous ESE approaches.

Enhanced perversities

On a complex manifold, the Riemann–Hilbert correspondence embeds the triangulated category of (not necessarily regular) holonomic {\mathcal{D}}-modules into the triangulated category of {\mathbb{R}}-constructible enhanced ind-sheaves. The source category has a standard t-structure. Here, we provide the target category with a middle perversity t-structure, and prove that the embedding is exact.In the paper, we also discuss general perversities in the framework of {\mathbb{R}}-constructible enhanced ind-sheaves on bordered subanalytic spaces.

Appreciating language conventions: thirteen-month-old Chinese infants understand that word generalization is shared practice

Language is conventional because word meanings are shared among different people. The present study examined Chinese infants’ understanding of the language convention that different people should generalize words in the same way. Thirteen-month-old Mandarin-speaking Chinese infants repeatedly viewed a speaker providing a novel label for a target object in the presence of a distractor object. Next, the objects changed colour and infants viewed the same speaker and a new speaker providing the label for either the different coloured target or distractor. They were also asked by both speakers to locate the correct referent of the label. Results revealed that infants expected both speakers to generalize the label to objects that belonged to the target category. This is the first evidence demonstrating that Chinese infants perceive word generalization as a form of shared convention.