scholarly journals Map making: Constructing, combining, and inferring on abstract cognitive maps

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seongmin A. Park ◽  
Douglas S. Miller ◽  
Hamed Nili ◽  
Charan Ranganath ◽  
Erie D. Boorman
Keyword(s):  
Euclidean Distance ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Behavioral Flexibility ◽  
Cognitive Maps ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Relational Information ◽  
Relational Structures ◽  
Limited Experience ◽  
The Status

ABSTRACTCognitive maps are thought to enable model-based inferences from limited experience that can guide novel decisions–a hallmark of behavioral flexibility. We tested whether the hippocampus (HC), entorhinal cortex (EC), and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)/medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) organize abstract and discrete relational information into a cognitive map to guide novel inferences. Subjects learned the status of people in two separate unseen 2-D social hierarchies defined by competence and popularity piecemeal from binary comparisons, with each dimension learned on a separate day. Although only one dimension was ever behaviorally relevant, multivariate activity patterns in HC, EC and vmPFC/mOFC were linearly related to the Euclidean distance between people in the mentally reconstructed 2-D space. Hubs created unique comparisons between the two hierarchies, enabling inferences between novel pairs of people. We found that both behavior and neural activity in EC and vmPFC/mOFC reflected the Euclidean distance to the retrieved hub, which was reinstated in HC. These findings reveal how abstract and discrete relational structures are represented, combined, and enable novel inferences in the human brain.

scholarly journals Evaluation of Human Disturbance on the Activity of Medium–Large Mammals in Myanmar Tropical Forests

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 290
Author(s):  
Giacomo Cremonesi ◽  
Francesco Bisi ◽  
Lorenzo Gaffi ◽  
Thet Zaw ◽  
Hla Naing ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Disturbance ◽  
Daily Activity ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Circular Statistics ◽  
Large Mammals ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
The Status ◽  
Statistical Approaches

The effects of human disturbance represent one of the major threats for wildlife conservation. Many studies have shown that wildlife avoids or reduces direct contact with human activities through changes in activity patterns, and by minimizing spatiotemporal overlap. In this study, we investigated the possible effects of human presence on the temporal activity of medium-to-large mammals using two areas in Myanmar that differ in the intensity of human disturbance. We monitored temporal segregation mechanisms using camera trapping data and with two statistical approaches: daily activity overlaps between humans and wildlife and circular statistics. We did not find a significant difference in overlapping activity between areas but, thanks to circular statistics, we found that some species show changes in activity patterns, suggesting temporal avoidance. We observed that the daily activity of five species differed between areas of Myanmar, likely adopting mechanisms to reduce overlap in areas highly frequented by humans. Interestingly, these species are all threatened by hunting or poaching activities, four of which have been described in literature as “cathemeral”, or species that are active through day and night. This study suggests that some species adapt their behavior, at least partially, to avoid human presence in habitats with higher anthropic occurrence and increase our knowledge on the status of medium–large mammals in a poorly studied country as Myanmar.

scholarly journals Piecing Together Cognitive Maps One Dimension at a Time

Neuron ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 107 (6) ◽  
pp. 996-999
Author(s):  
Jacob L.S. Bellmund
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Maps ◽  
One Dimension

The Short Career of the Indian Labour Corps in France, 1917–1919

2015 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 27-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radhika Singha
Keyword(s):  
Military Personnel ◽  
First World War ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Status ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Social Agendas ◽  
First World

AbstractThis essay adds the story of the Indian Labour Corps (ILC) to the narratives of the various “coloured” units brought in to France to deal with the manpower crisis that had overtaken that theater of the First World War in 1916. The label “coloured” or “native labour” justified inferior care and a harsher work and disciplinary regime than that experienced by white labor. However, official reports and newspaper coverage also expose a dense play of ethnographic comparison between the different colored corps. The notion was that to “work” natives properly, the managerial regimes peculiar to them also had to be imported into the metropolis. The register of comparison was also shaped by specific political and social agendas which gave some colored units more room than others to negotiate acknowledgement of their services. One dimension of the war experience for Indian laborers was their engagement with institutional and ethnic categorizations. The other dimension was the process of being made over into military property and the workers own efforts to reframe the environments, object worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned. By creating suggestive equivalences between themselves and other military personnel, they sought to lift themselves from the status of coolies to that of participants in a common project of war service. At the same time, they indicated that they had not put their persons at the disposal of the state in exactly the same way as the sepoy.

scholarly journals The nocturnal bottleneck and the evolution of activity patterns in mammals

2013 ◽  
Vol 280 (1765) ◽  
pp. 20130508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Menno P. Gerkema ◽  
Wayne I. L. Davies ◽  
Russell G. Foster ◽  
Michael Menaker ◽  
Roelof A. Hut
Keyword(s):  
Energy Balance ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Protection System ◽  
Dna Protection ◽  
Light Detection ◽  
Dominant Taxon ◽  
Visual Systems ◽  
Daytime Activity ◽  
Mammalian Lineage ◽  
The Status

In 1942, Walls described the concept of a ‘nocturnal bottleneck’ in placental mammals, where these species could survive only by avoiding daytime activity during times in which dinosaurs were the dominant taxon. Walls based this concept of a longer episode of nocturnality in early eutherian mammals by comparing the visual systems of reptiles, birds and all three extant taxa of the mammalian lineage, namely the monotremes, marsupials (now included in the metatherians) and placentals (included in the eutherians). This review describes the status of what has become known as the nocturnal bottleneck hypothesis, giving an overview of the chronobiological patterns of activity. We review the ecological plausibility that the activity patterns of (early) eutherian mammals were restricted to the night, based on arguments relating to endothermia, energy balance, foraging and predation, taking into account recent palaeontological information. We also assess genes, relating to light detection (visual and non-visual systems) and the photolyase DNA protection system that were lost in the eutherian mammalian lineage. Our conclusion presently is that arguments in favour of the nocturnal bottleneck hypothesis in eutherians prevail.

scholarly journals Predictive Representations in Hippocampal and Prefrontal Hierarchies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iva K. Brunec ◽  
Ida Momennejad
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Cognitive Maps ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Weighted Sum ◽  
Relational Structures ◽  
Relational Knowledge ◽  
Pattern Similarity ◽  
The World ◽  
Neuroimaging Data ◽  
Posterior Anterior

AbstractAs we navigate the world, we use learned representations of relational structures to explore and reach goals. Studies of how relational knowledge enables inference and planning are typically conducted in controlled small-scale settings. It remains unclear, however, how people use stored knowledge in continuously unfolding navigation, e.g., walking long distances in a city. We hypothesized that predictive representations, organized at multiple scales along posterior-anterior prefrontal and hippocampal hierarchies, guide naturalistic navigation. We conducted model-based representational similarity analyses of neuroimaging data measured during navigation of realistically long paths in virtual reality. We tested the pattern similarity of each point–along each path–to a weighted sum of its successor points within different predictive horizons. We found that anterior PFC showed the largest predictive horizons, posterior hippocampus the smallest, with the anterior hippocampus and orbitofrontal regions in between. Our findings offer novel insights into how cognitive maps support hierarchical planning at multiple scales.

scholarly journals Focusing on what matters: Modulation of the human hippocampus by relational attention

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia I. Córdova ◽  
Nicholas B. Turk-Browne ◽  
Mariam Aly
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
The Other ◽  
Temporal Relations ◽  
Relational Processing ◽  
Relational Information ◽  
Dynamic Display ◽  
Pattern Similarity ◽  
Online Extraction

AbstractHippocampal episodic memory is fundamentally relational, consisting of links between events and the spatial and temporal contexts in which they occurred. Such relations are also important over much shorter time periods, during online visual perception. For example, how do we assess the relative spatial positions of objects, their temporal order, or the relationship between their features? Here, we investigate the role of the hippocampus in such online relational processing by manipulating visual attention to different kinds of relations in a dynamic display. While undergoing high-resolution fMRI, participants viewed two images in rapid succession on each trial and performed one of three relational tasks, judging the images’ relative: spatial positions, temporal onsets, or sizes. As a control, they sometimes also judged whether one image was tilted, irrespective of the other; this served as a baseline item task with no demands on relational processing. All hippocampal regions of interest (CA1, CA2/3/DG, subiculum) showed reliable deactivation when participants attended to relational vs. item information. Attention to temporal relations was associated with more robust deactivation than the other conditions. One possible interpretation of such deactivation is that it reflects hippocampal disengagement. If true, there should be reduced information content and noisier, less reliable patterns of activity in the hippocampus for the temporal vs. other tasks. Instead, analyses of multivariate activity patterns revealed more stable hippocampal representations in the temporal task. Additional analyses showed that this increased pattern similarity was not simply a reflection of the lower univariate activity. Thus, the hippocampus differentiates between relational and item processing even during online visual perception, and its representations of temporal relations in particular are robust and stable. Together, these findings suggest that the relational computations of the hippocampus, known to be important for memory, extend beyond this purpose, enabling the rapid online extraction of relational information in visual perception.

scholarly journals Betwixt and Between: How Male and Female Audiences Engaged with the "Magnetic Girl" to Complicate Fin-de-Siècle Gender Roles

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Lowry
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Individual

Lulu Hurst was a young Gilded Age-era performer known for her demonstrations of uncanny physical strength. For the most part, Hurst’s performance involved challenging an audience member to wrest objects from her grasp. For a member of Hurst's predominantly male audience, matching her strength to his own was a means by which to prove his masculinity to his peers. The notion of masculinity being on trial was particularly significant in the late nineteenth century--a time when women were beginning to gain social power.  Elaine Showalter famously describes this period as being characterized by a "battle within the sexes" as well as between them (9). As such, I argue that Hurst’s “demonstrations of strength” are best understood within the context of what Marvin Carlson terms "resistant performance"--that is, a performance that subverts the status quo by exposing its underlying assumptions. Drawing on Victor Turner’s work on ritual and liminality, I argue that when the individual male agent separates himself from his peers in order to challenge Hurst, his gender identity temporarily becomes destabilized. However, while Hurst may have disrupted the status quo by troubling gender binaries, her performance also served to reify existing social hierarchies. This paradox is both a marker of resistant performance and of social change. For the postmodern reader, Hurst's performance is significant in that her demonstrations reveal the implications of resistant performance during a unique period of cultural transition in which gender identity was called into question. 

Unpacking ‘status migration’: The racialized status politics of ‘skill’ in French-Maghrebi expatriation to Dubai

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-54
Author(s):  
Jaafar Alloul
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Skill Sets ◽  
The Status ◽  
Status Politics ◽  
French Citizen

This ethnographic article details the resettlement process of Mounir, a French citizen of Maghrebi background migrating from Paris to Dubai. In so doing, it examines how social status formation plays out in the context of skilled labour migration between France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Drawing on semi-structured interviews and multi-sited participant observation, it questions human capital theory’s premise that ‘skills’ largely consist of a transposable set of objective technical qualifications. Instead, it finds that any effective validation of skill sets encompasses ‘claims-making’ processes that are co-dependent on social hierarchies of place, such as citizenship, class and race. The ‘expatriate’ portrait presented here demonstrates how tertiary-educated members of the Euro-Maghrebi minority engage in transcontinental migration not only as a way of dealing with hampered economic conversion yields of Bourdieusian capital forms in their home societies, but equally to renegotiate a more comprehensive transformation of social status. By describing Mounir’s hybrid repositioning at the interstices of more dominant status markers in Dubai, this article theorizes ‘status migration’, a transnational process of human mobility, characterized by the skilful propensity of acting-by-moving from the part of (racially) degraded citizens in dealing with the status deficiencies specific to them in their home societies.

Metaphors in banking

Neophilology ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 139-149
Author(s):  
Svyatoslav Y. Spirchagov
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Cognitive Maps ◽  
Target Area ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Conceptual Metaphors ◽  
National Cultures ◽  
The Status ◽  
Banking Institution ◽  
Terminology System

Contemporary theory of metaphor highlights its cognitive nature as opposed to traditional view of metaphor as rather a trope. We address the status and significance of conceptual metaphors in English banking terminology. A large-scale corpus analysis of English banking discourse (1888728 words) is conducted to determine how this trope is used. The application of a cognitive approach to a banking discourse has led to identification of metaphoric structures characterizing banking discourse. We confirm the use of terminology system corpus for (organic, mechanical, military, liquid, sports) metaphor models. We prove that banking discourse is highly metaphoric and borrows metaphors from multiple terminological domains. We establish the evolution of certain metaphors. We define the connections between concept areas of cognitive maps. We also prove that not all semes are transferred from the source to the target area, which confirms the connection at the conceptual level. Special attention is paid to the nexus of banking institution and social and political aspects of national cultures. This in turn allows to substantiate and test the theory of conceptual metaphor, and also served as means for a detailed study of conceptual metaphors as a culturally determined phenomenon in language. Given that metaphor is a dynamic cognitive mechanism, we detect diverse ways of metaphorization.

Doomed to disagree? Party-voter discipline and policy gridlock under divided government

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 801-822 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Fernández-Albertos ◽  
Víctor Lapuente
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Veto Players ◽  
Divided Government ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Low Degree ◽  
The Status ◽  
Party Institutionalization

This article explains the existence of policy gridlock in systems with divided government, even when there are policies that are universally preferred to the status quo. It is shown analytically that one dimension of party institutionalization (the degree of party-voter discipline) may create incentives for veto players to block policies that, ideologically, they might like. This is the case because when party attachments dominate voters' behaviour across different electoral arenas, veto players in the opposition might find it in their electoral interests to prevent popular policies from being adopted. We illustrate our argument by analysing the recent experiences of two Latin American democracies living under divided government but with opposite levels of party-voter discipline: Mexico and Brazil. Contrary to the received wisdom, the low degree of party institutionalization in Brazil may have helped the passing of comprehensive policy reforms, whereas strongly institutionalized parties in Mexico might have been partly responsible for the persistence of policy gridlock.

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