Mid-level feature differences underlie early animacy and object size distinctions: Evidence from EEG decoding

Responses to visually-presented objects along the cortical surface of the human brain have a large-scale organization reflecting the broad categorical divisions of animacy and object size. Mounting evidence indicates that this topographical organization is driven by differences between objects in mid-level perceptual features. With regard to the timing of neural responses, images of objects quickly evoke neural responses with decodable information about animacy and object size, but are mid-level features sufficient to evoke these rapid neural responses? Or is slower iterative neural processing required to untangle information about animacy and object size from mid-level features? To answer this question, we used electroencephalography(EEG) to measure human neural responses to images of objects and their texform counterparts - unrecognizable images which preserve some mid-level feature information about texture and coarse form. We found that texform images evoked neural responses with early decodable information about both animacy and real-world size, as early as responses evoked by original images. Further, successful cross-decoding indicates that both texform and original images evoke information about animacy and size through a common underlying neural basis. Broadly, these results indicate that the visual system contains a mid-level feature bank carrying linearly decodable information on animacy and size, which can be rapidly activated without requiring explicit recognition or protracted temporal processing.

A positivist approach to rights of nature in the European Union

A growing number of jurisdictions throughout the world have recognized some type of legal rights of nature. This jurisprudential trend has thus far made few inroads in Europe. However, its apparent absence is misleading. In this article we argue that, explicit or not, nature as protected by European Union (EU) law already has certain legal rights in the Hohfeldian sense because other entities have legal obligations towards it. Moreover, we argue that recent decisions of the Court of Justice of the EU can be interpreted to support our claim that nature, as protected by EU law, already enjoys some legal rights that cannot be trumped by mere utilitarian interests, and that these rights can in turn be recognized and applied by national courts. We further suggest that public interest litigation can contribute to developing rights for nature in Europe, even absent any explicit recognition of these rights in EU law or in national legislation.

The COVID-19 Shock: A Bayesian Approach

The coronavirus crisis that started in December 2019 was declared a pandemic by March 2020 and had devastating global consequences. The spread of the virus led to the implementation of different preventive measures prior to the availability of effective vaccines. While many governments implemented lockdowns to counter the pandemic, others did not let the virus halt economic activity. In this paper, we use a Bayesian Vector Autoregressive framework to study the effects of the pandemic on prices, unemployment rates, and interest rates in nine countries that took distinctive approaches in tackling the pandemic, where we introduce lockdowns as shocks to unemployment. Based on impulse response functions, we find that in most countries the unemployment rate rose, interest rates fell or turned negative, and prices fell initially following the implementation of the lockdown measures. However, the massive fiscal and monetary stimulus packages to counteract the effects of the pandemic reversed some of the effects on the variables, suggesting that models with explicit recognition of such effects should be developed.

On Loving God Contrary to a Divine Command

Among the most widely discussed of William Ockham’s texts on ethics is his Quodlibet III, q. 14. But despite a large literature on this question, there is no consensus on what Ockham’s answer is to the central question raised in it, specifically, what obligations one would have if one were to receive a divine command to not love God. (Surprisingly, there is also little explicit recognition in the literature of this lack of consensus.) Via a close reading of the text, the author argues, contrary to much of the literature, that Ockham believes that if one were given this command, one would be obligated to refrain from loving God and would also be able to fulfill this obligation without any moral wrongdoing. Among other results, this study will help clarify Ockham’s much-discussed claim that loving God is “a necessarily virtuous act.”

Constitutionalizing Access

State constitutions receive relatively little academic attention, yet they are the source of significant substantive rights—and, when compared to the U.S. Constitution, they are relatively easily amended to comport with contemporary needs and values. Unlike the constitutions of dozens of other nations, the U.S. Constitution contains no explicit recognition of a right to information from the government, and the Supreme Court has declined to infer that such a right exists, apart from narrow exceptions. Conversely, seven states expressly memorialize the public’s right of access to government meetings and records in their constitutions. In this paper, the authors examine case law applying the constitutional right of access, concluding that the right is somewhat underutilized and rarely seems to produce an outcome clearly different from what a litigant could expect relying on state statutory rights alone.

Shopping Around and One-Off Graphs

Given explicit recognition between ~1915 and the 1930s that certain artifact types display unimodal frequency distributions over time, archaeologists initially presented tables of those frequencies but by the 1930s were experimenting with different types of graphs to present visual images of culture change. The lack of familiarity with graph theory and graph grammar meant numerous kinds of graph were published, often only once each as researchers sought effective (readily deciphered) and efficient (minimal ink and space) graph forms. These experimental graph types range from fairly simplistic to complex and virtually indecipherable. Lack of decipherability and errors in some graphs reflect poor understanding of the principles of graph construction and the precise nature of what a graph type is meant to illustrate. The analytical focus on culture history and recognition that artifact form varied along both time and geographic space led to some efforts to incorporate all three dimensions—form, time, space—into some graphs. It is not surprising that in the search for a useful graph type, the one-off graphs variously implied transformational, variational, and a combination of variational and transformational evolutionary change.

Recognising Freedom of Thought in Irish Constitutional Law

Recent technological advances have made clear that law needs to take a stance in relation to freedom of thought. Although there is no formal recognition of freedom of thought in the text of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, I will argue that such a right does exist in Irish law on the basis of both implicit and initial explicit recognition for freedom of thought in the decisions of the superior courts. Part 2 lays out the ways in which freedom of thought is implicitly recognised in the Irish legal system, both through the protection of other constitutional rights and through the place of international law in the Irish legal order. Part 3 takes the analysis a step further, using the doctrine of unenumerated rights (a peculiarity of Irish constitutional law) to spotlight an overlooked Supreme Court judgment in which the right to freedom of thought has been judicially recognised in the absence of a textual mandate in the Constitution. It then proceeds to shore up arguments in favour of such recognition, arguing that protecting freedom of thought is a good thing, because it honours human freedom and human dignity.

Modulation of early level EEG signatures by distributed facial emotion cues

Face perception plays an important role in our daily social interactions, as it is essential to recognize emotions. The N170 Event Related Potential (ERP) component has been widely identified as a major face-sensitive neuronal marker. However, despite extensive investigations conducted to examine this electroencephalographic pattern, there is yet no agreement regarding its sensitivity to the content of facial expressions.Here, we aim to clarify the EEG signatures of the recognition of facial expressions by investigating ERP components that we hypothesize to be associated with this cognitive process. We asked the question whether the recognition of facial expressions is encoded by the N170 as weel as at the level of P100 and P250. In order to test this hypothesis, we analysed differences in amplitudes and latencies for the three ERPs, in a sample of 20 participants. A visual paradigm requiring explicit recognition of happy, sad and neutral faces was used. The facial cues were explicitly controlled to vary only regarding mouth and eye components. We found that non neutral emotion expressions elicit a response difference in the amplitude of N170 and P250. In contrast with the P100, there by excluding a role for low level factors.Our study brings new light to the controversy whether emotional face expressions modulate early visual response components, which have been often analysed apart. The results support the tenet that neutral and emotional faces evoke distinct N170 patterns, but go further by revealing that this is also true for P250, unlike the P100.

EXPRESS: Influence of emotional prosody, content and repetition on memory recognition of speaker identity

Recognizing individuals through their voice requires listeners to form an invariant representation of the speaker’s identity, immune to episodic changes that may occur between encounters. We conducted two experiments to investigate to what extent within-speaker stimulus variability influences different behavioral indices of implicit and explicit identity recognition memory, using short sentences with semantically neutral content. In Experiment 1 we assessed how speaker recognition was affected by changes in prosody (fearful to neutral, and vice versa in a between-group design) and speech content. Results revealed that, regardless of encoding prosody, changes in prosody, independent of content, or content, when prosody was kept unchanged, led to a reduced accuracy in explicit voice recognition. In contrast, both groups exhibited the same pattern of response times (RTs) for correctly recognized speakers: faster responses to fearful than neutral stimuli, and a facilitating effect for same-content stimuli only for neutral sentences. In Experiment 2 we investigated whether an invariant representation of a speaker’s identity benefited from exposure to different exemplars varying in emotional prosody (fearful and happy) and content (Multi condition), compared to repeated presentations of a single sentence (Uni condition). We found a significant repetition priming effect (i.e., reduced RTs over repetitions of the same voice identity) only for speakers in the Uni condition during encoding, but faster RTs when correctly recognizing old speakers from the Multi, compared to the Uni, condition. Overall, our findings confirm that changes in emotional prosody and/or speech content can affect listeners’ implicit and explicit recognition of newly familiarized speakers.

THE DIGITAL ECONOMY AND THE QUEST FOR PRIVACY PROTECTION IN BANGLADESH: A COMPARATIVE LEGAL ANALYSIS

The present unbridled advancement in the field of information and communication technology has resulted in individuals being thrust at a crossroad, where refusing to sacrifice one’s privacy would mean the denial of technological benefits. Concern for privacy begins once a child is born into this world where the right to privacy could now be argued needs to be considered as one of the basic human rights similar to other inalienable rights such as the right to life and liberties. Bangladesh is one of the countries that has not given explicit recognition to the right of privacy. This is evident from the absence of explicit indications of the right to privacy in the Constitution of Bangladesh and judicial interventions make the constitutional protection of privacy questionable. The purpose of the present study is to find out whether the right to privacy is in fact recognized and protected by the Constitution of Bangladesh by examining specific provisions in the Constitution of Bangladesh to locate provisions that could be relied on to show that a sliver of recognition could be given to the right of privacy in Bangladesh. This position is then compared to other jurisdictions, especially the common law jurisdictions. The study finds that although Article 43 of the Constitution guarantees limited protection that encompasses the right to privacy of home and correspondence but if read together with the right to life and liberty in Article 32, it could be argued that these are viable provisions in recognizing the right to privacy under the Constitution of Bangladesh.