(S)cars: Exploring America's Automotive Self

The article opens with an autoethnographic account of its author's encounter with the American sense of space in the context of the clash of his own and American cultural norms related to car ownership and car use. The initial anecdotes, in which the negative experiences of the authors lack of knowledge of the essentials of the car culture in the US prove to be instrumental in the process of learning and adaptation, lead to a more profound, historiosophic reflection upon the cars as vehicles of ethics across American cultural history.

Policy Learning and Adaptation in governance; a Co-evolutionary Perspective

This paper introduces the concepts and ideas that frame this special issue on co-evolution in governance, and their implications for policy learning and adaptation. It offers a brief overview of co-evolutionary approaches to governance and their elementary connections with systems theories, post-structuralism, institutionalism, and actor-network theory, and explores how they are connected to co-evolution in governance. Co-evolutionary approaches differ from other influential understandings of knowledge and learning in policy and governance. It furthermore presents a typology of learning in governance and systematically discusses how each type is affected by patterns of coevolution in governance.

The Story and the Data

Creative economies are touted as engines for economic prosperity and social good in cities. The wide applicability and inclusive definition of what counts in creative economies means that conceptual definitions are not universal. Studies on the promise of the creative economy have emerged, however, analyses of these reports and their policy value are scarce. We explore five creative economy reports, applying the Narrative Policy Framework, a novel analytic lens for comparing policy documents according to “setting,” “characters,” “plot,” and “moral of the.” Key contributions of this research center the ways that reports use rhetorical devices and empirical data to support claims and recommendations, forwarding policy learning and adaptation as tools for building and sustaining creative city branding.

Context-Sensitive Control of Adaptation: Self-Modeling Networks for Human Mental Processes Using Mental Models

Within their mental and social processes, humans often learn, adapt and apply specific mental models of processes in the world or other persons, as a kind of blueprints. In this paper, it is discussed how analysis of this provides useful inspiration for the development of new computational approaches from a Machine Learning and Network-Oriented Modeling perspective. Three main elements are: applying the mental model by internal simulation, developing and revising a mental model by some form of adaptation, and exerting control over this adaptation in a context-sensitive manner. This concept of controlled adaptation relates to the Plasticity Versus Stability Conundrum from neuroscience. The presented analysis has led to a three-level computational architecture for controlled adaptation. It is discussed and illustrated by examples of applications how this three-level computational architecture can be specified based on a self-modeling network and used to model controlled learning and adaptation processes based on mental models in a context-sensitive manner.

Experimental Protocol to Test Explicit Motor Learning–Cerebellar Theta Burst Stimulation

Implicit and explicit motor learning processes work interactively in everyday life to promote the creation of highly automatized motor behaviors. The cerebellum is crucial for motor sequence learning and adaptation, as it contributes to the error correction and to sensorimotor integration of on-going actions. A non-invasive cerebellar stimulation has been demonstrated to modulate implicit motor learning and adaptation. The present study aimed to explore the potential role of cerebellar theta burst stimulation (TBS) in modulating explicit motor learning and adaptation, in healthy subjects. Cerebellar TBS will be applied immediately before the learning phase of a computerized task based on a modified Serial Reaction Time Task (SRTT) paradigm. Here, we present a study protocol aimed at evaluating the behavioral effects of continuous (cTBS), intermittent TBS (iTBS), or sham Theta Burst Stimulation (TBS) on four different conditions: learning, adaptation, delayed recall and re-adaptation of SRTT. We are confident to find modulation of SRTT performance induced by cerebellar TBS, in particular, processing acceleration and reduction of error in all the conditions induced by cerebellar iTBS, as already known for implicit processes. On the other hand, we expect that cerebellar cTBS could induce opposite effects. Results from this protocol are supposed to advance the knowledge about the role of non-invasive cerebellar modulation in neurorehabilitation, providing clinicians with useful data for further exploiting this technique in different clinical conditions.

Neurons in Primary Motor Cortex Encode External Perturbations during an Orientation Reaching Task

When confronting an abrupt external perturbation force during movement, subjects continuously adjust their behaviors to adapt to changes. Such adaptation is of great importance for realizing flexible motor control in varied environments, but the potential cortical neuronal mechanisms behind it have not yet been elucidated. Aiming to reveal potential neural control system compensation for external disturbances, we applied an external orientation perturbation while monkeys performed an orientation reaching task and simultaneously recorded the neural activity in the primary motor cortex (M1). We found that a subpopulation of neurons in the primary motor cortex specially created a time-locked activity in response to a “go” signal in the adaptation phase of the impending orientation perturbation and did not react to a “go” signal under the normal task condition without perturbation. Such neuronal activity was amplified as the alteration was processed and retained in the extinction phase; then, the activity gradually faded out. The increases in activity during the adaptation to the orientation perturbation may prepare the system for the impending response. Our work provides important evidence for understanding how the motor cortex responds to external perturbations and should advance research about the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying motor learning and adaptation.