bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Accountability, Political Parties, and the Media
Authors: Green Duncan
Published: July 2024

This chapter discusses political parties and the media as two crucial institutions that provide avenues for accountability, as well as the burgeoning field of ‘social accountability’, in both elected and unelected regimes. Despite recent setbacks to democratic accountability in many countries, political party systems are both an opportunity and a threat for activists and their organizations. Parties can be long-term institutional homes for policies and ideas. The media route is another method of ensuring accountability, as the media can echo, amplify, or substitute for citizens’ voices. Lastly, the social accountability route is a more recent phenomenon, driven both by new technology and the need for solutions when states are weak or unresponsive. This particular route attempts to promote accountability by approaching authorities directly, instead of relying on intermediaries, such as political parties or bureaucracies. All three routes provide valuable channels for activists to hold those in power to account for their decisions, provided they invest in understanding and building relationships with the players.
Leaders and Leadership
Authors: Green Duncan
Published: July 2024

This chapter turns to the role of leaders and leadership in driving change. Though these roles are often downplayed or outright neglected in academia, the chapter argues that leadership is central to any understanding of how change happens. ‘Leaders’ in this case are not limited to politicians only—the chapter also examines leadership from below—that which emerges from citizens’ movements, voluntary associations, trade unions, and faith organizations, in every walk of life. Leadership comes in many forms, but feminist leadership is perhaps most compatible with the arguments about power and systems set out in this book. Leaders operate at the interface between structure and agency, striving to leave their mark on the institutions, cultures, and traditions in which they live and work. Activists need to understand where leadership comes from and how to best identify, support, and work with progressive leaders.
Making Change Happen: How Do We Put It All Together?
Authors: Green Duncan
Published: July 2024

This chapter offers a methodology for activists seeking to use this book to sharpen their change strategies and tactics. It gives suggestions for how to unpack complex problems; identify points of entry for activism; then use power analysis and stakeholder mapping to better understand the individuals and institutions you are seeking to influence. It cautions against being overly linear, arguing that, in order to flourish in complex systems, activists should cultivate curiosity, humility, self-awareness, and openness to a diversity of viewpoints. It explores the obstacles such an approach faces, in terms of conventional ways of working, thinking, and funding activism. It encourages us to nurture a genuine curiosity about the complex interwoven elements that characterize the systems we are trying to influence, without abandoning our desire to take action.
Introduction
Authors: Wentker Alexander
Published: July 2024

Contemporary armed conflicts are increasingly characterised by cooperation. Identifying who among the cooperation partners becomes a party to the conflict is therefore a frequent and challenging question. That question has received little attention, even though the parties to the conflict are a key notion to the regulation of armed conflict. Asking how we can tell and why it matters who is a party to an armed conflict is warranted in light of wider developments relating to the structure of the international legal order and the ways in which contemporary armed conflicts are fought. This chapter introduces the theme of the book, its relevance, and its argument. It also sets out the structure of the book and delineates its scope.
Introduction
Authors: Loewer Barry
Published: July 2024

The idea that the universe is governed by laws of nature has precursors from ancient times and in non-European cultures, but the view that one of the main aims of the sciences is to discover fundamental universal mathematical laws only became established during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Europe, when it replaced the then prevalent Aristotelian conception of science. This chapter introduces the goals of the book and gives a brief history of the development of the concept of laws in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emphasizing that laws were conceived of a system of mathematical principles that describe how God governs the motions of matter.
Non-Humean Accounts of the Metaphysics of Laws
Authors: Loewer Barry
Published: July 2024

Non-Humean accounts involve some kind of fundamental natural necessity. This chapter discusses a variety of non-Humean accounts of laws including governing accounts due to David Armstrong, Tim Maudlin, Eddy Chen, and Shelly Goldstein and powers accounts associated with Alexander Bird, Brian Ellis, and Sidney Shoemaker. Governing accounts replace God with laws to governing the motions of bodies. The main problem with governing accounts is explaining what they are and how laws govern. Some versions also seem to require a problematic primitive direction of time. Powers accounts maintain the Aristotelian view that various kinds of entities have characteristic dispositions. The main problems with powers accounts are explaining how powers produce regularities and how they can account for fundamental laws of contemporary physics. They also seem to require a primitive direction of time.
Problems with Perfectly Natural Properties
Authors: Loewer Barry
Published: July 2024

Lewis’s metaphysics makes essential use of perfectly natural properties in his accounts of laws, modality, similarity, and reference. The Humean mosaic is the distribution of instantiations of perfectly natural properties throughout all of space-time. The laws of a world are determined by the best systematization of its Humean mosaic. Lewis claims that the perfectly natural properties instantiated in the actual world are categorical, instantiated at points, intrinsic, and that the only perfectly natural relations are space-time relations. This chapter argues that physics posits fundamental properties that don’t satisfy these conditions and that metaphysics should not dictate to physics the nature of fundamental properties and relations. Because of this there may be a mismatch between the Lewisian best systematization of the Humean mosaic and the best systematization and laws according to physics. Conflicts between Lewis account and quantum mechanics, the standard model of elementary particles etc. are discussed.
Translating Europe in Ælfric's Lives of Saints
Authors: Ostacchini Luisa
Published: July 2024

This book argues that Ælfric of Eynsham (955–1010) deliberately adapted information from European Latin sources in order to emphasize ideals of community, cooperation, and collective identity to English audiences in his Lives of Saints, the most stylistically and narratively accomplished collection of hagiography composed in early medieval England. Moreover, it examines, for the first time, the Lives as a unified collection whose individual items comprise one thematic and didactic whole. Although the Lives of Saints is composed in Old English and was intended to educate English audiences, its sanctorale consists primarily of Frankish, Italian, and Spanish saints rather than English ones, thus providing unique insight into the ways in which Europe was represented in late tenth-century English literature. Through close comparison between the items within the Lives and their Latin sources, this book demonstrates that Ælfric’s interest in community was both inward- and outward-looking: he sought, on the one hand, to situate England within the wider Christian world and on the other to promote the internal unity of the English kingdom and the reformed monastic establishment. As such, the book sheds new light on the ways in which Ælfric wrote about the Christian world and England’s place within it, and further illuminates the didactic praxis and ideology of one of the most influential and significant authors of the early medieval period.
Translating Europe
Authors: Ostacchini Luisa
Published: July 2024

This chapter considers the literary translation of descriptions of European geographies and establishes that Ælfric conceived of a unified ‘European’ Christian community, roughly occupying the old territories of the western Roman Empire and centred around Rome, which was distinct from the rest of the world. While Ælfric presents locations such as Rome, Milan, and Sicily as enjoying unique topographical or historical features and as such being distinct from one another, he nonetheless largely homogenizes the depictions of European locations found in his sources and in doing so suggests that disparate places might nonetheless share in a single sense of community with one another.
Translating People
Authors: Ostacchini Luisa
Published: July 2024

This chapter continues the idea of physical translation from Chapter 2 and turns to Ælfric’s missionary saints, who move between European places. In these missionary lives, Ælfric draws on the real-world importance of European mission and missionaries to early medieval English religious self-conception and ecclesiastical history. It is in these lives that Ælfric is most able to present Europe as enjoying a single intellectual community. This community is facilitated by knowledge exchange between various locales and between the monastic and lay spheres: in Ælfric’s Lives monks and laymen work collaboratively and travelling to a foreign land to teach or to be taught becomes a saintly quality. In presenting missionary activity, Ælfric also presents intellectual community as a panacea for the ecclesiastical and political turmoil faced by his contemporary English audiences. In doing so, he consistently highlights the importance of cooperation between geographically disparate communities and between the lay and monastic spheres, and thereby promotes ideological unity between geographically and culturally disparate Christian communities as an imperative for both secular and ecclesiastical success.
Literature, Gaps, and Ahistoricity
Authors: Khair Tabish
Published: July 2024

This chapter sets out to illustrate how a historical reading, so useful in the case of the text treated in the previous chapter, does not exhaust the possibilities of meaning and significance in literature. It does so by providing a thoroughly ‘ahistorical’ reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a reading that neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporaries would have given to the play. Hamlet is read against the backdrop of ‘collateral damage’ in recent global affairs. However, the chapter argues that such a reading is not a free play of words: from our space of observation, the text actually encourages such an ‘ahistorical’ reading, as against many other possible readings. This aspect is also presented as a dimension of what is called the ‘agnostic’ reading demanded by literature.
Fundamentalism, Literature, and God
Authors: Khair Tabish
Published: July 2024

This chapter returns to focus on a matter that has been addressed frequently in earlier chapters, but not discussed at length: the argument that literature is an antidote to all kinds of fundamentalism. Here, first, fundamentalism is defined as a textual matter: an insistence on singular or fixed readings of texts. The definition of fundamentalism as a textual matter—dependent on modes of reading—differs from extant definitions of fundamentalism related to rituals or thinking, and adds a new perspective to the matter. Then, the ongoing discussion of literature as denoting and demanding a distinctive relationship to language (and ‘reality’) is applied to this perception to show how the reading—agnostic—demanded by literature is the antidote to fundamentalism. This argument is illustrated with extensive references to ‘The Book of Job’, which is read as literature.
The Jonson Folios
Authors: Orgel Stephen
Published: July 2024

When Ben Jonson, in his mid-forties, produced his Workes in folio he was declaring himself a classic author while he was still alive. He placed his plays first in the volume and edited them on the model of sixteenth-century editions of classical drama. Even more audaciously, he included his masques and entertainments, duly revised to make the events sound grander than in fact they were, and to remove elements that were no longer to Jonson’s credit. Jonson took control of his theater pieces, removing the agency of the performers, so that the plays and masques were addressed by the author directly to the reader.
Classical Models
Authors: Orgel Stephen
Published: July 2024

From the late seventeenth century, Seneca has had a bad press in England. Rhetorical and declamatory, the plays were repeatedly declared unsuited to the stage. For the English Renaissance, however, Seneca was a model for drama. The plays were taught in school, and translations of all ten plays attributed to Seneca appeared between 1560 and 1581. Not only early Shakespeare, but plays like King Lear and Othello reflect Seneca’s influence. This is largely invisible to us because our way of performing Shakespeare renders soliloquies meditative rather than declamatory, and strives for naturalism rather than stylization.
The Counterprotests
Authors: Das Acevedo Deepa
Published: July 2024

This chapter begins the day after the Supreme Court issued its opinion regarding Sabarimala’s admissions policy. The chapter documents the extreme excitement—both positive and negative—that greeted the IYLA decision, and it explores three developments that unfolded in the aftermath of the opinion’s release. First, female activists and journalists who had been newly enabled by the Court’s opinion attempted to visit Sabarimala, but their efforts were almost entirely thwarted. Second, civic life in Kerala and electoral politics at both the state and all-India levels were impacted by IYLA. Finally, this chapter considers developments within and affecting the Indian Supreme Court over the last decade and explains how these developments have impacted both the Court’s internal functioning and its external reputation.
The Case
Authors: Das Acevedo Deepa
Published: July 2024

This chapter conducts an in-depth tour of the decision in Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala. The chapter explores each of the four opinions and compares their different approaches to key issues of constitutional interpretation. It also highlights some of the particularly remarkable features of each opinion, including Chief Justice Misra’s description of Ayyappan devotees as ‘just Hindus’, Justice Nariman’s exploration of key religious texts’ attitudes towards menstruation and impurity, Justice Chandrachud’s discussion of untouchability, and Justice Malhotra’s analysis of denominational diversity. The chapter also conducts a deeper exploration of key jurisprudential concepts introduced in the first chapter of this book and pays close attention to the Court’s engagement with relevant statutory law regarding temple governance.
Conditioning and Associative Learning
Authors: Mason Alice , Ludvig Elliot A. , Madan Christopher R.
Published: July 2024

Associative learning is the process whereby humans and other animals learn the predictive relationship between cues in their environment. This process underlies simple forms of learning from rewards, such as classical and operant conditioning. This chapter introduces the basics of associative learning and discusses the role that memory processes play in the establishment and maintenance of this learning. It then discusses the role that associative learning plays in human memory, including through paired associate learning, the enhancement of memory by reward, and the formation of episodic memories. Next, the chapter illustrates how the memory process influences choice in decision-making, where associative learning allows people to learn the values of different options. The chapter concludes with some suggestions about how models of associative learning, memory, and choice can be integrated into a single theoretical framework.
Working Memory as Persistent Neural Activity
Authors: Foster Joshua J. , Vogel Edward K. , Awh Edward
Published: July 2024

Working memory (WM) is an online memory system that allows people to hold information “in mind” in service of ongoing cognitive processing. Short-term retention of information typically involves an interplay between WM and long-term memory (LTM), especially when task demands or interruptions divert focus from remembered items. This chapter suggests that active neural representation may distinguish between “online” representations in WM and “offline” representations in LTM. This perspective is at odds with “activity-silent” models of WM, which hold that WM representations can be sustained without persistent neural activity. The chapter suggests that activity-silent representations might be more productively conceptualized as offline representations in LTM because accessing these representations shows multiple signatures of retrieval from LTM. Moreover, active neural traces track WM load, predict individual differences in performance, and respect sharp item limits in WM storage. Thus, it is argued in this chapter that using neural activity as an operational definition of WM may provide strong traction for studying the dynamic collaboration between WM and LTM that is critical for intelligent behavior.
Attribute Theories of Memory
Authors: Polyn Sean M.
Published: July 2024

Attribute theories propose that a cognitive system constructs representations with constituent elements that reflect the attributes, features, properties, or characteristics of the world and the things in it. These theories are flexible; attributes may be used to describe tangible physical things in one’s environment but also intangible things such as plans and concepts. In the domain of memory, attribute theories describe how representations of one’s experience are stored, retrieved, and manipulated by the cognitive system. The mathematical language of linear algebra is central to these theories. Vector operations are used to define various measures of representational distance and similarity. Matrices are used to define associative structures such as synaptic weights in neural network models and sets of memories in instance theory models. This chapter examines some foundational attribute-based approaches to memory theory, including early attempts to define psychological similarity, and the influential stimulus-sampling theory. It reviews important empirical phenomena involving memory attributes, including proactive interference, encoding specificity, and source memory. Finally, the chapter considers how attribute-based approaches have influenced modern cognitive neuroscientific investigations and theory.
Events and Boundaries
Authors: DuBrow Sarah
Published: July 2024

Human experience unfolds continuously, yet memories tend to be organized into discrete episodes. Event segmentation theory provides a framework for understanding this discretization by suggesting that ongoing experience is characterized by extended periods of high predictability (events) punctuated by transitions between stable states (event boundaries). This chapter begins with a brief introduction to theories of event segmentation in perception and language. Then, the majority of the chapter reviews interactions between event processing and episodic memory, drawing from theoretical, behavioral, and neuroscience literatures. The first section of this review focuses on boundary-related memory processes, including transient memory enhancements, boundary-triggered reinstatement or replay, and the discretization of neighboring events in memory. The second section focuses on processing that unfolds within events, including working memory maintenance, retrieval of schematic information, and ongoing prediction. Together, these data highlight a fundamental relationship between online event segmentation and episodic memory. Finally, some key challenges and open questions for future research are discussed.
Oscillatory Brain Mechanisms for Memory Formation
Authors: Hanslmayr Simon , Staresina Bernhard P. , Jensen Ole
Published: July 2024

Brain oscillations refer to rhythmic activity of neural populations, which can be observed in the human brain. The temporal structure of these oscillations can influence neural firing and, in turn, affect information processing and synaptic plasticity. In this manner, oscillatory activity could shape the neural mechanisms of memory formation. This chapter reviews how oscillations relate to human memory processes. It discusses the potential functions of oscillatory activity in different brain regions, such as the neocortex and the hippocampus. Furthermore, it discusses the potential role of neural oscillations during the different stages of memory formation, from encoding processes during wakefulness to offline processes during sleep. Studies that observe oscillations during memory experiments are discussed alongside studies that manipulate oscillations attempting to behaviorally impact on memory. The reviewed literature suggests that oscillations may hold important answers as to how the human brain manages to encode, maintain, and consolidate memories.
Serial Recall
Authors: Hurlstone Mark J.
Published: July 2024

Serial memory refers to the ability to recall a novel sequence of items or events in the correct order. In the laboratory, the dominant tool used to assess this mental faculty is the immediate serial recall task, in which participants are given a sequence of typically verbal, visual, or spatial items that they must subsequently recall in their original presentation order. Serial recall is a deceptively simple task—the apparent ease with which people accomplish it masks the wealth and complexity of findings this task has generated and the computational theories that have been developed to account for them. This chapter reviews benchmark findings of serial recall that have been observed across the verbal, visual, and spatial short-term memory domains, and these are interpreted with reference to the core mechanisms embodied in contemporary computational theories of serial recall. This analysis identifies four mechanisms that are common to the three content domains—namely position marking, a primacy gradient, competitive queuing, and response suppression. In addition, evidence suggests that in verbal serial recall, both the encoding and retrieval of items are sensitive to item similarity—similarity-sensitive encoding and retrieval—and that item retrieval is accompanied by output interference. By contrast, in visual and spatial serial recall, there is evidence for similarity-sensitive retrieval, but the relevant empirical observations that evince similarity-sensitive encoding and output interference are yet to be studied in the visual and spatial domains. The chapter concludes by outlining some challenges for future research.
Discrimination, Recognition, and Classification
Authors: Mack Michael L. , Palmeri Thomas J.
Published: July 2024

Retrieval processes provide ways of using memory. This chapter describes three important ways of using memory, with a focus on using memory to make decisions about visual objects. Discrimination is deciding if an object is distinct from another object experienced at the same time or moments ago, recognition is deciding if an object is the same as an object experienced some time in the past, and classification is deciding what kind of object something is. All three require comparing the representation of a currently perceived object with representations retrieved from memory to drive a decision process. The chapter discusses the component mechanisms for discrimination, recognition, and classification as formally instantiated in computational models and also discusses relationships between model mechanisms and brain mechanisms as revealed by neuropsychology and brain imaging.
Recognition Memory
Authors: Yonelinas Andrew P. , Ramey Michelle M. , Riddell Cameron
Published: July 2024

Recognition memory is perhaps the simplest and most widely studied measure of episodic memory. Behavioral and neural studies have examined a variety of different types of recognition tasks and shown that recognition judgments can be based on two functionally and neurally separable processes (i.e., the recollection of qualitative or relational information about the study event and assessments of item familiarity). This chapter considers the different types of recognition memory tests that are commonly used, and it demonstrates why it is important to collect multiple-point measures of performance, such as recognition confidence judgments, in assessing recognition memory. The chapter then briefly reviews evidence that recognition reflects the contributions of recollection and familiarity, and it highlights relevant results from studies examining recognition confidence receiver operating characteristics. Next, it considers the progress that has been made in behavioral studies characterizing the functional nature of those processes, as well as in lesion and neuroimaging studies examining the role of the different medial temporal lobe regions that support recognition judgments. The results of these studies have been important in assessing a number of competing theoretical claims about the processes underlying recognition, in characterizing memory changes in various conditions such as aging and amnesia, and in developing neurocomputational models of recognition and the medial temporal lobes. Moreover, these findings have been useful in revealing how different recognition processes are related to other cognitive functions, such as those underlying emotion, implicit memory, working memory, and perception.
Evidence Accumulation and Decision Processes
Authors: Starns Jeffrey , Heathcote Andrew
Published: July 2024

This chapter reviews the use of evidence accumulation models in memory research, with a particular focus on the diffusion decision model and the linear ballistic accumulator model. These models accommodate choice proportions and response time (RT) distributions by combining information from evidence samples that arrive over time as a decision is being made. Evidence samples can be defined as draws from statistical distributions, or evidence accumulation mechanisms can be combined with process models of memory retrieval, such as global matching models. The chapter explains the basic assumptions of evidence accumulation models, discusses ways that decision modeling has influenced memory research in general, and reviews studies that have used evidence accumulation models to investigate memory processes. These studies show that evidence accumulation models provide a new perspective on established phenomena and support new discoveries by accounting for decision processes that cannot be evaluated by alternative models that ignore RT data, such as signal detection theory models.
Current Perspectives on Directed Forgetting
Authors: Sahakyan Lili
Published: July 2024

This chapter reviews updated Directed Forgetting (DF) research, reflecting significant changes in the field. It is divided into four sections, beginning with methodologies of item-method and list-method DF and their measurement challenges. The next section addresses how people respond to directed forgetting cues by implementing forgetting strategies, suggesting a shift towards controlled processes. Subsequent sections summarize empirical and theoretical developments, indicating a paradigm shift that has taken place in DF theorizing—namely, list-method DF, once attributed to retrieval inhibition is now considered by some to reflect a context-change phenomenon, whereas item-method DF, previously explained by selective rehearsal processes is now being reevaluated for encoding inhibition and contextual unbinding processes. Such views provide a radical departure from the ways that DF has been interpreted previously, and they highlight how conceptualizing about DF has evolved in light of newer research methodologies and findings.
Prospective Memory
Authors: Bayen Ute J. , Rummel Jan , Ballhausen Nicola , Kliegel Matthias
Published: July 2024

Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform an intended action at the appropriate time in the future. People must frequently perform PM tasks in daily life. After providing an introduction to standard laboratory and naturalistic research paradigms for the study of PM, this chapter includes a critical review of current theories of PM and formal modeling approaches for the study of cognitive processes underlying performance in PM tasks. The chapter then provides an overview of the life span development of PM from childhood to older adulthood, followed by an overview of applied aspects and a review of the literature on PM in clinical populations.
Metacognition
Authors: Metcalfe Janet
Published: July 2024

Metacognition refers to people’s ability to reflect and make judgments about their memory, perception, and other mental states and processes and to use those reflections to alter their own knowledge and mental processes. It is at core a cognitive process that provides the potential for people to be self-determined rather than stimulus determined. This chapter summarizes advances in the understanding of the heuristic basis of metacognition. It details some of the biases and fallacies that can result from use of these heuristics, including that people give evidence, under some specific circumstances, of not realizing very obvious facts of learning and memory, such as that they will forget over time, that studying improves memory, or that they learn from errors. Understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to metacognitive judgments—as well as allowing researchers to demonstrate that people are subject to such metacognitive illusions—provides the possibility to improve people’s metacognition and to know when it is likely to be faulty and thereby take necessary corrective action.
Individual Differences in Working and Long-Term Memory
Authors: Unsworth Nash
Published: July 2024

There are clear and important individual differences in memory. This chapter provides a review of evidence for individual differences in working and long-term memory. Individual differences studies examining potential sources of variation in working and long-term memory and their relations to other cognitive constructs are discussed. Furthermore, interactions between working and long-term memory are discussed, suggesting that these two constructs interact during encoding and retrieval. Overall, there are robust and important individual differences in both working and long-term memory, and it is suggested that future research is needed to better clarify the similarities and differences between these two forms of memory.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Authors: Brewin Chris R. , Ehlers Anke
Published: July 2024

This chapter describes how post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is diagnosed, contrasting traditional “broad” formulations with a “narrow” formulation focusing on core symptoms introduced in ICD-11. The ICD-11 distinction between PTSD and complex PTSD is also described. Next, the chapter presents the two signature changes consisting of vivid re-experiencing of the traumatic event in the present coupled with impaired voluntary recall of the event. Other aspects of memory affected in PTSD that are unrelated to the traumatic event are also described. Three prominent controversies are discussed: whether traumatic memories are “special,” whether traumatic events can be forgotten, and whether there is evidence for delayed-onset PTSD. Contemporary theories of PTSD are then described, all of which identify deficits in memory for context as central to the disorder. Finally, the chapter discusses likely mechanisms involved in psychological therapy for PTSD: habituation/extinction, updating/reconsolidation, and metacognitive change.
Brain Stimulation
Authors: Ezzyat Youssef , Suthana Nanthia
Published: July 2024

The development of experimental methods has fueled the scientific study of memory, and understanding of memory processes advances with new experimental tools. Memory researchers are increasingly focusing on brain stimulation methods, which offer powerful approaches to probe and manipulate neural substrates of memory. This chapter explores both invasive and noninvasive brain stimulation methods, detailing their impact on episodic memory. Advances in these methods enable precise targeting of neural populations, influencing specific memory states. The chapter also addresses clinical applications, highlighting challenges that remain in using these tools for causal manipulation and investigation of neural activity and behavior. The potential for manipulating memory causally and predictably suggests a continued role for stimulation methods in the cognitive neuroscience of human memory. Understanding the physiological consequences of stimulation on memory networks allows researchers to accelerate developing applications that leverage theoretical advances in memory science for the benefit of society.
Memory for Salient Shared Events
Authors: Hirst William , Merck Clinton
Published: July 2024

The study of collective memory has burgeoned in the past few years, adopting either a top-down or bottom-up approach. This chapter reviews research from a top-down perspective. Social representations of world and national history, the character of national memories, the way in which personal memories give resonance to memories for public events, and the transmission of historically relevant personal memories, especially intergenerationally, are investigated, as well as collective future thinking. Although researchers are beginning to understand the nuances of the ways in which people represent the historical past and how these representations differ from history, a general theory is still needed.
Event Memory in Fact and Fiction
Authors: Bezdek Matthew A. , Butler Andrew C. , Zacks Jeffrey M.
Published: July 2024

Humans are able to bind together features of past events and use these memories to guide action in the present. There are many parallels between memory for real-life and fictional events: Both factual and fictional event representations share commonalities in how space and time are represented. Both are affected by emotional responses and by the prior knowledge brought to bear on events as they unfold. However, there are some areas in which memory for real and fictional events may differ. The parallels between memory for fact and memory for fiction, as well as their exceptions, support a proposal that memory for fiction depends largely on mechanisms that evolved to support retrieval of information about lived events. Narratives are ubiquitous in human culture, and they are often highly sought after. One reason for this may be that memories of fictions can help people better navigate the world as it is in fact.
Deep Learning
Authors: McClelland James L. , Botvinick Matthew M.
Published: July 2024

Deep learning—the study of learning in artificial neural networks containing many layers of neuron-like elements—captures and even exceeds human abilities in many domains. Because human brains are also deep neural networks that learn, deep networks provide a fertile ground for modeling human memory and learning, and they open up the possibility of joint engagement between the study of biological and artificial intelligence. This chapter introduces the basic constructs employed in deep learning and considers several of the widely used deep-learning paradigms and architectures. It then considers how the constructs of deep neural network models relate to traditional constructs in the psychological literature on learning and memory. Next, the chapter reviews recent developments in the field of reinforcement learning that have broad implications for human learning and memory. The chapter concludes by noting that human intelligence still exceeds current deep learning systems in many ways and describes future directions for research aimed toward bridging the gap.
Memory in the Digital Age
Authors: Storm Benjamin C. , Soares Julia S.
Published: July 2024

Digital technologies have changed the everyday use of human memory. When information is saved or made readily available online, there is less need to encode or maintain access to that information within the biological structures of memory. People increasingly depend on the internet and various digital devices to learn and remember, but the implications and consequences of this dependence remain largely unknown. The digital world of tomorrow is likely to be very different from the digital world of today, pushing the study of human memory into a constant state of flux. This chapter provides an overview of research to date on memory in the digital age. It focuses in particular on issues related to transactive memory, cognitive offloading, photo-taking, social media use, and learning in the classroom.
Procedural and Motor Learning
Authors: Knowlton Barbara J. , Schorn Julia M.
Published: July 2024

Procedural memory is a form of implicit memory whereby people may learn skills through practice without conscious awareness of what has been learned. Whereas declarative memory is often described as “knowing that,” procedural memory is considered “knowing how.” For example, it may be difficult for a pianist to verbally explicate what she does when she plays a passage, but she could easily demonstrate it. Although motor skill learning is the most representative example of procedural memory, perceptual and cognitive skills can also be learned through practice without awareness of what has been learned. Procedural memory is tested in the lab using tasks such as the pursuit rotor task, the serial reaction time task, and various probabilistic classification tasks. Studying clinical populations, such as patients with diseases of the basal ganglia, can inform understanding of the neural substrates of procedural memory. Patients with Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease are impaired on procedural memory tasks relative to their performance on declarative memory tasks. The opposite is true for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and those who have sustained a traumatic brain injury. Patients with psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and Gilles de la Tourette syndrome also show deficits in procedural learning. Research with different clinical populations has deepened understanding of the neural correlates of procedural memory and points to the basal ganglia and the cerebellum as key regions. Future research should consider the role of procedural memory in childhood development because developmental disorders likely involve procedural learning systems.
“Up Again, Old Heart!”
Authors: Neely Michelle C.
Published: July 2024

This essay demonstrates how significant Emerson’s work might be to understanding and responding to our current climate and ecological emergencies. If Emerson frequently seems to be on the side of toxic individualism rather than entanglement, moral suasion rather than radical action, and profit-driven exploitation of the earth rather than stewardship and care, we nevertheless have much to learn about how these culturally dominant positions are made attractive and rational in Emerson’s writings. And yet, the main part of the essay demonstrates that Emerson is uniquely poised to help us grapple with contemporary climate denialism and climate grief, with our inability to adequately conceptualize or mourn the damage we are doing to the planet. Through readings of “Experience,” “Circles,” some of Emerson’s poetry, and more, the essay shows how Emerson can help us commit ourselves to reparative action in the face of overwhelming ecological loss.
Speaking for “the Indian”
Authors: Lopenzina Drew , Mielke Laura L.
Published: July 2024

In 1838 Emerson wrote feelingly on behalf of the Cherokee in regard to their forced removal, and yet his rhetorical construction of Indigenous identity typically remained locked in denigrating modes of expression, contributing to an ongoing literary violence being done toward Native people in an era that plotted no future for Indigenous civilization. In an 1835 address celebrating Concord’s bicentennial, Emerson insists, “No man spake for the Indian,” but also concluding, “Alas! For them—their day is o’er.” Just one year later, however, William Apess, a Pequot activist, author, and ordained Methodist minister, delivers his Eulogy on King Philip, in which he speaks “for the Indian” and “as an Indian,” envisioning a role for Native peoples on the national stage. Reading forward from this pairing, the essay interrogates Emerson’s ability to “speak for the Indian” and his inability to imagine Indigenous presence in his subsequent writings.
Emersonian Figurations in Modern Hispanic Poetics
Authors: Miguel-Alfonso Ricardo
Published: July 2024

This essay traces the significance of Emerson’s thinking in the formation of modern Spanish American poetics, especially between the 1880s and the 1940s. Aside from a few signal studies, Emerson remains an understudied ghostly presence in the formation of modern Hispanic poetics, one that ultimately reaches into the so-called Latin American “boom” of the 1960s. Emerson’s influence in the Hispanic world can be felt in places as diverse as Mexico (Octavio Paz), Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges), Chile (Vicente Huidobro), and Cuba (José Lezama Lima, José Martí, Alejo Carpentier). In this context, it is suitable to explore Emerson’s influence as a poetic and philosophical inspiration, as someone who provided ideas—of poetry, democracy, and freedom—that would later transpire in different genres by different hands and in different territories. In this sense, his legacy in the Hispanic world is more dispersed but also more far-reaching than anybody else’s.
Metamorphosis and Transcription
Authors: McGill Meredith L.
Published: July 2024

Emerson’s “The Poet” is a rare example of an essay that is frequently taught, but seldom studied and widely misunderstood. A staple of the American literature survey, the essay is usually called on to bridge the gap between Emerson’s philosophy and Whitman’s radical poetic practice, but in doing so, this chapter argues, scholars misread Emerson’s poetic theory and unnecessarily divorce his aesthetics from his poetic practice. Reading Emerson’s essay alongside his poem “The Snow-Storm,” the chapter will elucidate his antiformalist commitment to form and align his theory with the poetic practices that were so important to him and to other Transcendentalists: the keeping of commonplace books, the anthologizing and translation of European verse, and the incorporation of poetry into lectures, essays, and travel narratives.
Emerson Undersea
Authors: Navakas Michele , Mastroianni Dominic
Published: July 2024

This chapter begins by considering the twenty-first-century reception of Emerson’s thinking about nature, and then proposes a new direction for understanding that thinking: the development and expansion of two key Emersonian ideas in the work of Rachel Carson, arguably the most important American environmental writer of the twentieth century. The chapter argues that Carson embraces the Emersonian ideas of abandonment and impersonality as essential to accurately perceiving nature and the complex place of humans within the more-than-human world. These ideas shape her formative writings about the ocean that paved the way for her groundbreaking bestseller, Silent Spring (1962). Carson’s overlooked uptake of Emersonian ideas provides new evidence of the value of reading Emerson at the Anthropocene. It illuminates an uncharted American Transcendentalist current of Carson’s environmental thinking. And it suggests that Emerson’s most exciting contributions to environmental thought may emerge from his less obviously “environmental” reflections on self, being, and perception.
Emerson, Rhetoric, and Oratorical Culture
Authors: Thompson Roger
Published: July 2024

Building on a foundation of platonic rhetoric, Emerson proposes a radically democratic theory of rhetoric that disrupts nineteenth-century oratorical traditions. Emerson’s extensive readings in ancient rhetoric and rhetorical theory serve as a foundation for his understanding of how oratory and public speaking more generally are harnessed to foster social change, but, much as with his theology, he ultimately breaks from tradition to advance an inclusive notion of rhetoric that extended the capacity for eloquence to any person, regardless of level of education or upbringing. This expansive vision of rhetoric embraced diverse viewpoints and “panharmony,” the idea that only through broad participation in public speech could a harmonious culture emerge. While persuasion remains at the center of this view of rhetoric, Emerson insists that only rhetoric that resonates with Transcendental truth carries with it the possibility of meaningful social action and the hope for transformation of the cultural institutions that work toward justice.
The Collection of Tattoos of the Museum of Criminal Anthropology “Cesare Lombroso” and of the Museum of Human Anatomy, University of Turin (Italy)
Authors: Cilli Cristina , Giacobini Giacomo , Leschiutta Pierpaolo , Manni Franz , Montaldo Silvano
Published: July 2024

This chapter traces evolution of the collections of tattoos focusing on the contributions of Cesare Lombroso, the founder of the Criminal Anthropology at the University of Turin and his theory of criminal atavism, posting tattoos as a sign of reversion to a primitive state. It presents the system of classification he devised for the tattoos in his collection and shows different kinds of exhibits. The tattoo collections housed at the Museum of Criminal Anthropology are associated with other collections, no less historically meaningful, in the older Museum of Human Anatomy housed in the same building. The chapter provides examples of ongoing work on the tattoo collections it describes, including recent public exhibitions that update the discourse about body modification and society. But not all of Lombroso’s work is obsolete, and his observation that inmate tattoos are more similar to the engravings on the water jars attributed to each prisoner than to those appearing on the walls of the penitentiary cells is interesting. Tattoos and water jars became an upfront communication system that the current museum display depicts.
Burning, Cutting, Piercing, and Tattooing the Skin for Healing Purposes
Authors: Renaut Luc
Published: July 2024

In preindustrial societies, a large proportion of body modifications were performed for therapeutic or prophylactic reasons. Cauterising or incising the skin and, of course, tattooing, could leave indelible marks that were sometimes deliberately sought or, conversely, avoided. This chapter identifies and describes the original practices, methods, and etiologies of the various types of therapeutic interventions employed across Eurasia and the Mediterranean regions, from antiquity to the early twentieth century, emphasizing primary sources and firsthand ethnographic data. It draws attention to little-known procedures that were nevertheless in widespread and ancient in use, such as cauterization with tinder (fungibustion), piercing, and puncturing. By comparing Greco-Roman and Chinese medical traditions it shows that literate medicines of these two distant cultural areas shared the same tendency to discredit and marginalize invasive interventions, or to make them less painful and likely to permanently scar the skin. More generally, the procedures studied here could contribute toembedding the emergence of certain body modification practices (tattooing, scarification, and piercing) within a therapeutic context, even if their purposes extended beyond healing or protection.