“... And Their Mosques From Churches of God to Build in Distant Places”: to Qquestion of Formation of Interethnic and Interfaith Borders in Western Siberia in 18th Century

The process of building ethno-religious boundaries in the 18th century in the social space of Western Siberia is considered on the example of the provincial center — Tobolsk. The relevance of the study is due to the transformation of ethno-confessionalism from a cultural phenomenon into an instrument that can be used for political purposes in modern Russia. One of the methodological research tools is the method of analysis of the “new local history”, which allows you to create a holistic perception of the study of the social life of the past “at a local object”. The main stages of the state ethno-confessional policy in the 18th century are highlighted. The facts of the forced Christianization of Muslims are clarified. The authors draw attention to the role of the personal (subjective) factor in the processes under study. On the example of the activities of Metropolitan Sylvester Glovatsky and the governor F. I. Soimonov, the vector of the development of interfaith relations is considered, which often depends on the foresight and ideological attitudes of local authorities. Particular attention is paid to government decrees reflecting the position of the state in the ethno-religious sphere. The features are revealed and the main stages of the process of Christianization of Siberian Muslims during the 18th century are highlighted. The process of formation of interfaith boundaries in the multiethnic Siberian region is analyzed. The historiography of the topic under study is presented.

Holistic face recognition is an emergent phenomenon of spatial processing in face-selective regions

Spatial processing by receptive fields is a core property of the visual system. However, it is unknown how spatial processing in high-level regions contributes to recognition behavior. As face inversion is thought to disrupt typical holistic processing of information in faces, we mapped population receptive fields (pRFs) with upright and inverted faces in the human visual system. Here we show that in face-selective regions, but not primary visual cortex, pRFs and overall visual field coverage are smaller and shifted downward in response to face inversion. From these measurements, we successfully predict the relative behavioral detriment of face inversion at different positions in the visual field. This correspondence between neural measurements and behavior demonstrates how spatial processing in face-selective regions may enable holistic perception. These results not only show that spatial processing in high-level visual regions is dynamically used towards recognition, but also suggest a powerful approach for bridging neural computations by receptive fields to behavior.

Shades of hope: Marcel’s notion of hope in end-of-life care

This article examines the compatibility and relevance of Gabriel Marcel’s phenomenology of hope in interdisciplinary research on the role of hope in end-of-life (EOL) care. Our analysis is divided into three thematic topics which examine the various shades of hope observed in Marcel’s phenomenology of hope and in the collection of 20 EOL studies on hope as experienced by adult palliative care (PC) patients, health care professionals (HCP) and parents of terminally ill children. The three topics defining the shades of hope are: the meaning of hope in its dynamic aspects, the dialectics of hope and despair, and the transcendent facets of hope. We analyse how Marcel’s understanding of hope is reflected in EOL studies, and how this perception can enrich the philosophy of PC and significantly deepen and broaden HCPs’ understanding of hope. Our findings prove that despite terminological differences between Marcelian phenomenology and the concepts of hope in the 20 EOL studies, hope emerges as a resourceful movement towards being. Implementing Marcelian hope within communication in EOL care could help in HCPs’ interpersonal approach to patients as his concept harbors a holistic perception of the existential situation of a person. Equally, introducing Marcel’s phenomenology of hope into the clinical encounter could play a beneficial role in improving the ability of patients to adapt to the difficult conditions of their disease and PC treatment.

Smarter Grid in the 5G Era: A Framework Integrating Power Internet of Things With a Cyber Physical System

As the energy infrastructure of smart cities, smart grid upgrades traditional power grid systems with state-of-the-art information and communication technologies. In particular, as the full deployment of the Internet of Things in the power grid (a.k.a. power Internet of Things or PIoT), the newly introduced information flow together with inherent energy flow makes it more efficient for power generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption. To further exploit the precious energy and the latest 5G technologies, this article boosts to add a value flow in the smart grid, mainly including the value created by innovative services and market mechanisms and the value added by the information flow. Specifically, by integrating PIoT with cyber-physical systems, this article sketches a conceptual framework of the cyber-physical power system (CPPS). The CPPS carries out holistic perception and ubiquitous connection of distributed energy sources and electrical facilities and builds up a smarter power grid with global information interaction, intelligent decision-making, and real-time agile control. Finally, for illustration purposes, we conduct a case study regarding an intelligent home management system.

Between Rationalism and Romanticism - Archaeological Heritage Management in the 1990s

In this article it is argued that "heritage" both as a theoretical concept and a practice, is central to defining archaeology's role in society. Greater critical attention should therefore be given to this arena of archaeological practice on the part of theoretical archaeology and the heritage administration itself. Since archaeological heritage management is situated between interests in the present, these have to be defined as a first step. Three basic concepts and their role in shaping the development of archaeological heritage management are briefly analysed: the cultural environment, the cultural biography and cultural identity. It is argued that they are part of a development towards a more holistic perception and ideological use of the cultural heritage. This invites political manipulation. To avoid this, certain universal objectives in combination with ethical guidelines are suggested.

Perceiving Tempo in Incongruent Audiovisual Presentations of Human Motion: Evidence for a Visual Driving Effect

Compared to vision, audition has been considered to be the dominant sensory modality for temporal processing. Nevertheless, recent research suggests the opposite, such that the apparent inferiority of visual information in tempo judgements might be due to the lack of ecological validity of experimental stimuli, and reliable visual movements may have the potential to alter the temporal location of perceived auditory inputs. To explore the role of audition and vision in overall time perception, audiovisual stimuli with various degrees of temporal congruence were developed in the current study. We investigated which sensory modality weighs more in holistic tempo judgements with conflicting audiovisual information, and whether biological motion (point-light displays of dancers) rather than auditory cues (rhythmic beats) dominate judgements of tempo. A bisection experiment found that participants relied more on visual tempo compared to auditory tempo in overall tempo judgements. For fast tempi (150 to 180 BPM), participants judged ‘fast’ significantly more often with visual cues regardless of the auditory tempo, whereas for slow tempi (60 to 90 BPM), they did so significantly less often. Our results support the notion that visual stimuli with higher ecological validity have the potential to drive up or down the holistic perception of tempo.

Oculomotor Reactions in Students During Text Perception

The study of oculomotor reactions in the process of performing cognitive tasks is becoming increasingly popular among psychophysiologists. The use of eye tracking techniques extended our knowledge about eye movements when perceiving visual information. Modern research using eye tracking focuses on oculomotor reactions while perceiving images and texts, performing logical visual tasks, etc. It should be noted that eye tracking parameters in visual cognitive activity not only reflect the peculiarities of eye movements, but also serve as markers of brain activity in terms of perception and processing of information. Of particular interest are eye tracking studies involving reading texts of varying complexity and emotional content with normal and inverted word order in sentences. This paper presents the results of an eyetracking research involving students during visual perception of texts. Two types of texts were used: text with correct order of letters and text with changed order of letters in words. We examined 40 students of Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov using the eye tracking system iView X ™ RED (SensoMotoric Instruments, Germany). It recorded a significantly higher number of fixations and saccades as well as longer duration of fixations while reading the text with changed order of letters in words. The subjects demonstrated a holistic perception of words when working with the text with changed order of letters, which led to shorter reading time. As a result, we identified two ways of visual information processing with high reproducibility, regardless of the text type: focused and superficial reading. For citation: Zvyagina N.V., Taleeva A.I., Kuznetsova D.A. Oculomotor Reactions in Students During Text Perception. Journal of Medical and Biological Research, 2021, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 145–152. DOI: 10.37482/2687-1491-Z052

Protect Others to Protect Myself: A Weakness of Western Countries in the Face of Current and Future Pandemics? Psychological and Neuroscientific Perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a large number of publications in the medical and biological fields concerning the virus and its treatments, as well as in psychology, social sciences, and data sciences with regard to the spread of the virus. Surprisingly, far fewer neuroscientific articles have been published in this field of research and one might well ask whether the cognitive neurosciences have anything to say at all about this vital topic. In this article, we highlight a research perspective relating to differences in the individual perception of the pandemic in Western compared to Eastern countries. Although this problem is complex, multifaceted and subsumes many other social variables, we suggest that the cognitive neurosciences do have important and fundamental insights to contribute concerning the collective response observed within these populations. More precisely, we propose the hypothesis that differences in the propensity to adopt a holistic perception of contamination processes at the group level, involving brain structures that are also associated with perspective-taking and empathy such as, in particular, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), could help explain the differences in the perception of the pandemic observed between Western and Eastern countries.

Violation of the cooperative principle as the manifestation of “communicative sabotage” speech genre

The article studies the “communicative sabotage” speech genre as a possible way of reacting to criticism in the response utterances of the presidents of Russia and the USA, V. V. Putin and B. Obama. The internal genre tactics of communicative sabotage are considered in relation to Grice’s Cooperative Principles. Both approaches are perceived as complementary in relation to each other, which allows to get a holistic perception of deviations from norms of interpersonal communication. The fact that communicative sabotage belongs to indirect communication reflects the specifics of the presidential discourse, which consists in the need to avoid inconvenient topics and to veil information in public communication with journalists. The role of communicative sabotage in solving pragmatic tasks of the president’s communication, such as the struggle for power, allows to attribute it to agonal speech genres.