Canonicity Effect on Sentence Processing of Persian-Speaking Broca’s Patients

This research with the aim of scrutinizing fundamental notions of mapping hypothesis tries to investigate the comprehension of diverse complex syntactic structures in four age, education and gender matched Persian-speaking Broca’s patients and eight matched healthy controls via conducting two tasks of syntactic comprehension and grammaticality judgment in which subjects’ comprehension of diverse complex structures were put into scrutiny. The structures being tested included subject –agentive, agentive passive, object experience, subject experience, subject cleft and object cleft constructions. Our results, while corroborating the predictions of mapping hypothesis, showed that in structures in which linguistic elements were substituted and dislocated out of their canonical syntactic positions, namely, agentive passive, subject- experiencer, object -experiencer and object- cleft constructions, Broca’s problems escalated. In contrast, in those structures whose constituent concatenations were aligned with canonical syntactic structures, namely subject agentive and cleft structures, patients had above chance performance. Ultimately, theoretical and clinical implications of the study were discussed

Using a multisensory storytelling approach to improve language and comprehension: A pilot study

Tactile object boxes, object walks, and object experience books are common practices that are recommended for children with visual impairment to promote language development and early literacy skills. However, there is limited research on the effectiveness of these practices leading to variations of how these practices are implemented in the classrooms. This pilot study examined the effectiveness of a multisensory storytelling approach on listening comprehension and language use in three bilingual children with visual impairment. The results suggest that the multisensory storytelling approach is a promising intervention for children with visual impairment in increasing their language skills but there were differential effects based on child characteristic differences. Implications for practice and directions for future research toward language assessments and implementation of the multisensory storytelling approached are discussed.

One-shot category learning in human infants

State-of-the-art artificial neural networks (ANNs) require enormous amounts of data to learn object categories. By contrast, human learning is fast and efficient. Most impressive is our capacity for ‘one-shot learning’, in which experience with a single exemplar permits inferences about a larger class of objects. This remarkable feat of categorization is integral to decision making but, surprisingly, remains poorly understood. Here we tested whether invariant object structure—namely, an object’s internal skeleton—supports one-shot category learning in human infants, a population with limited object experience and language. Across two experiments, 6- to 12-month-olds (Mage = 9.29 months; N = 82) were habituated to a single, never-before-seen object. They were then tested with objects that differed from the habituated object in their external features and either matched or mismatched in their skeletal structure. We found that infants only dishabituated to objects with different skeletons, as predicted if objects with the same skeleton belonged to the same class of objects. By contrast, two different ANN architectures (AlexNet and ResNet-50), trained with millions of either curated (ImageNet) or variable (Stylized-ImageNet) images, failed to categorize objects under the same conditions. Taken together, these findings suggest that single exemplar categorization reflects an early-developing sensitivity of the human visual system to perceptually invariant object structure.

Meditation as an Intervention for Health: A Framework for Understanding Meditation Research

We propose a framework for understanding meditation that can support greater scientific rigor in reporting meditation research, and selecting meditation health interventions. There is no consistent and thorough framework for describing meditation research interventions. This impedes rigor of meditation research design and interpretation of findings. This also limits meaningful comparisons across research studies. The audience for this article includes researchers, meditation experts, healthcare professionals, and those with interest in meditation. The framework describes the key components of a meditation intervention. We also discuss how meditation can effect individuals differently, and provide suggestions for describing the qualifications of the expert who designed the meditations in an intervention. The meditation framework supports (1) comparing different meditation interventions, and (2) understanding how meditation interventions lead to outcomes. We provide examples from a Yoga Therapy perspective of meditation (our domain of expertise), and from published research on meditation to illustrate applications of the meditation framework. The meditation framework provides a way of characterizing meditation interventions by distinguishing seven essential components. The first four components describe the meditation session (individual, object, experience, and immediate effects). Approach describes the foundation and source of a meditation practice. The outcome component represents both intended goals or reasons for prescribing the meditation intervention and other longer term effects that may occur. The engagement component refers to duration, spacing and frequency of doing the practice and quality of attention. These seven components can be applied to any type of meditation intervention. We explain the components of the framework and then offer examples. Our goal is to express the importance of having a framework for describing components of meditation across systems of knowledge and methods of application. We hope this article begins a dialogue with experts in other forms of meditation interventions, as they apply, adapt and respond to the proposed framework.

Constructing Digital Game Exhibitions: Objects, Experiences, and Context

A large number of exhibitions worldwide deal with digital games, but curators lack a coherent understanding of the different aspects of games that can be exhibited or a clear vocabulary for talking about them. Based on a literature review on game preservation and visitor behavior in exhibitions, the paper makes an argument for understanding digital games on display as made up of object, experience, and context aspects. The study further presents a matrix model for understanding and working with games in exhibitions. The model makes for a more nuanced understanding of the different ways digital games can be exhibited. Additionally, it clarifies the position of games in exhibitions as socioculturally constructed through inherently ideological curatorial choices.

Consumer and Object Experience in the Internet of Things: An Assemblage Theory Approach

The consumer Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to revolutionize consumer experience. Because consumers can actively interact with smart objects, the traditional, human-centric conceptualization of consumer experience as consumers’ internal subjective responses to branded objects may not be sufficient to conceptualize consumer experience in the IoT. Smart objects possess their own unique capacities and their own kinds of experiences in interaction with the consumer and each other. A conceptual framework based on assemblage theory and object-oriented ontology details how consumer experience and object experience emerge in the IoT. This conceptualization is anchored in the context of consumer-object assemblages, and defines consumer experience by its emergent properties, capacities, and agentic and communal roles expressed in interaction. Four specific consumer experience assemblages emerge: enabling experiences, comprising agentic self-extension and communal self-expansion, and constraining experiences, comprising agentic self-restriction and communal self-reduction. A parallel conceptualization of the construct of object experience argues that it can be accessed by consumers through object-oriented anthropomorphism, a nonhuman-centric approach to evaluating the expressive roles objects play in interaction. Directions for future research are derived, and consumer researchers are invited to join a dialogue about the important themes underlying our framework.

On the Ageing of Objects in Modern Culture: Ornament and Crime

The article seeks to develop a new conceptual framework suitable for analysing the ageing processes of objects in modern culture. The basic intuition is that object experience cannot be analysed separately from collective participation. The article focuses on the question of the ‘timeless’ nature of modernist design and seeks to understand why modernist objects age more slowly than other objects. First, inspired by the late Durkheim’s account of symbolism, I turn to the experiential effects of collective embeddedness. Second, I enter the field of architectural practices and architectural theory. Visiting early modernist ideologue Adolf Loos, I seek to understand the modernist attitude as a direct response to experiences of the acceleration of ageing processes characteristic of modern culture. I then try to show how Loos’s explicit awareness of the collective dimension is ignored by the subsequent modernist movement and by architectural theory. Finally, I try to assess the consequences of this neglect.