Whether non-human animals can have episodic memories remains the subject of extensive debate. A number of prominent memory researchers defend the view that animals do not have the same kind of episodic memory as humans do, whereas others argue that some animals have episodic-like memory—i.e., they can remember what, where and when an event happened. Defining what constitutes episodic memory has proven to be difficult. In this paper, I propose a dual systems account and provide evidence for a distinction between (...) event memory and episodic memory. Event memory is a perceptual system that evolved to support adaptive short-term goal processing, whereas episodic memory is based on narratives, which bind event memories into a retrievable whole that is temporally and causally organized around subject’s goals. I argue that carefully distinguishing event memory from episodic memory can help resolve the debate. (shrink)

Over 35 years ago, Meltzoff and Moore (1977) published their famous article ‘Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates’. Their central conclusion, that neonates can imitate, was and continues to be controversial. Here we focus on an often neglected aspect of this debate, namely on neonatal spontaneous behaviors themselves. We present a case study of a paradigmatic orofacial ‘gesture’, namely tongue protrusion and retraction (TP/R). Against the background of new research on mammalian aerodigestive development, we ask: How does (...) the human aerodigestive system develop and what role does TP/R play in the neonate’s emerging system of aerodigestion? We show that mammalian aerodigestion develops in two phases: (1) from the onset of isolated orofacial movements in utero to the post-natal mastery of suckling at 4 months after birth, and; (2) thereafter, from preparation to the mastery of mastication and deglutition of solid foods. Like other orofacial stereotypies, TP/R emerges in the first phase and vanishes prior to the second. Based upon recent advances in activity-driven early neural development, we suggest a sequence of three developmental events in which TP/R might participate: the acquisition of tongue control, the integration of the central pattern generator for TP/R with other aerodigestive CPGs, and the formation of connections within the cortical maps of S1 and M1. If correct, orofacial stereotypies are crucial to the maturation of aerodigestion in the neonatal period but also unlikely to co-occur with imitative behavior. (shrink)

Episodic memory gives us the ability to mentally travel back in time to revisit and relive past experiences. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the function of episodic memory. According to the orthodox view, episodic memory should be considered a part of a constructive system that simulates the future for sophisticated foresight and flexible planning. In this paper, I offer a novel alternative view. I argue that episodic memory provides invaluable information about the past behavior of (...) others, allowing us to identify reliable and trustworthy partners while avoiding dealing with cheaters. Theoretical models demonstrate that cooperation in groups can be maintained if potential partners use information about an individual’s past behavior to guide their behavior toward that individual. In these reputation-based models of human cooperation, individuals with a history of cheating are ostracized, whereas those with a history of cooperative behavior flourish. Against this theoretical background, it is possible to see a function of episodic memory in facilitating information exchange about others, helping group members make effective partner choices, and avoiding the risk of interacting with cheaters. If correct, episodic memory may have played a significant role in the evolution of human cooperation. (shrink)

Mahr & Csibra (M&C) argue that event and episodic memories share the same scenario construction process. I think this way of carving up the distinction throws the baby out with the bathwater. If there is a substantive difference between event and episodic memory, it is based on a difference in the construction process and how they are organized, respectively.

In our target article, we argued that the positive results of neonatal imitation are likely to be by-products of normal aerodigestive development. Our hypothesis elicited various responses on the role of social interaction in infancy, the methodological issues about imitation experiments, and the relation between the aerodigestive theory and the development of speech. Here we respond to the commentaries.

Hoerl & McCormack argue that animals cannot represent past situations and subsume animals’ memory-like representations within a model of the world. I suggest calling these memory-like representations as what they are without beating around the bush. I refer to them as event memories and explain how they are different from episodic memory and how they can guide action in animal cognition.

This paper focuses on the centrality of permaculture design courses as the principal sociopolitical strategy of the permaculture community in Canada to transform local food production practices. Building on the work of Antonio Gramsci and political agroecology as a framework of analysis, we argue that permaculture instruction remains deeply embedded within market and colonial relations, which orients the pedagogy of permaculture trainings in such a way as to reproduce the basic elements of the colonial capitalist economy among its practitioners. In (...) the specific case of eastern Ontario, this embeddedness had the effect of diluting the transformative capacity of permaculture practitioners who were unable to create its own social movement organization. The paper then highlights key elements of the agroecological pedagogy used by the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement and the Escola Latinoamericana de Agroecología in Paraná, Brazil. The objective is to draw lessons from these inspiring experiences, in a rather unique context of struggles that can help to critically assess the pedagogical practices and principles presently informing permaculture communities in Canada and in advanced industrialized countries more generally. We then conclude by reiterating the key arguments and lessons drawn from the Brazilian pedagogical experiences, pointing out the importance of engagement and coalition-building with established rural and urban movements, as well as progressive farmer, Indigenous, and rural associations to foster a just and sustainable transformation of agri-food systems, starting at the local and regional levels. It also emphasizes the need for the most marginalized sectors to lead the way towards an agroecological transition. (shrink)

BackgroundAlthough a large number of clinical trials on interventions demonstrating efficacy (or lack thereof) are conducted annually, much of this evidence is not accessible to scientists and clinicians.ObjectivesWe aimed to determine the publication rate of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) trials that have been registered in clinical trial registries, and the factors associated with publication.MethodsTrials, completed on January 15, 2015, were identified via the US National Institutes of Health clinical trials registry, the European Union Clinical Trials Register and the WHO International (...) Clinical Trials Registry Platform. A systematic search for publications (published by the end of March 2018) related to each of the registered trials were then performed.ResultsFour hundred and thirty-eight of 1982 potentially eligible trials were included. Only 34% of interventional trials were registered prior to initiation, 9% were registered within 2 months of starting and 20% after trial completion. Of the 438 included trials, 72% had generated peer-reviewed publications, while an additional 7% had disseminated results in some other form (such as on the trial database), 26 months after trial completion. Randomisation of a trial was the only factor individually associated with publication, in logistic regression analysis (p < 0.001). Intervention type, university as sponsor and study registration prior to completion were factors that influenced the time to publication, using Cox regression (p < 0.001).ConclusionsThis study underscores the importance of timely and accurate publication and dissemination of trial results, in order to avoid the potential waste of resources and to ensure research integrity and patient safety. We suggest that authors and journal editors adhere to conditions set out by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and that more diligent data sharing is encouraged through prospective trial registration and trial reporting websites. (shrink)

Is there an effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity? Are depressed individuals biased to interpret ambiguous information in a negative manner? We used a cross-modal semantic priming task to look for evidence of a negative interpretative bias. Participants listened to ambiguous prime sentences (e.g., Joan was stunned by her final exam mark) and made lexical decisions to target words presented immediately after the sentence offset or after a delay of 1000 ms or 2000 ms. For the semantically (...) related targets, the target was negatively related (distress), positively related (success), or neutrally related (grades) to the ambiguous prime. The experiment was conducted with and without a negative mood induction. The expectation was that depressed participants would be more likely to consider the negative interpretations of the ambiguous primes and would therefore experience larger priming effects for negatively related targets. Although there were large priming effects for all semantically related targets, there was no evidence of a negative interpretative bias. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans la mineure « Rythmanalyses » de la revue Multitudes, n° 46, 2011. Nous remercions la revue Multitudes et Fédéric Bisson de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Anna Cruz passe dans la rue au bruit de ses chaussures. Telle une sorte d'aura sonore, le martèlement sur l'asphalte est une puissance. Anna enfonce en cadence ses talons dans la conscience comme les aiguilles d'un vaudou quotidien. Le rythme prend son pied. Il n'est pas (...) seulement la carrure objective des pas, - Pour une éthique et une politique du rythme – Nouvel article. (shrink)

En s’appuyant sur les analyses goodmaniennes sur le style et l’expression, Frédéric Bisson montre, à l’encontre de Goodman et de Kripke, que le nom propre n’est pas seulement un signe dénotatif, mais peut fonctionner esthétiquement comme un prédicat stylistique. Le style n’est pas l’expression d’un foyer énergétique autonome que serait le sujet, mais une propriété objective de l’œuvre ou de la performance artistique. Lorsqu’il devient un prédicat stylistique, le nom n’est plus propre à une personne : la personne qui (...) porte ce nom n’en est qu’un cas paradigmatique. (shrink)

My subject on this occasion goes uneasily with my piety. Lordship did not as such much interest my teachers William E. Lunt and Joseph R. Strayer, who were leaders in their turn of the Medieval Academy of America. In their presidential addresses of 1954 and 1968 both scholars dealt magisterially with subjects each had studied for forty years. Lunt spoke on financial relations of the papacy with England, Strayer on the place of Normandy and Languedoc in the building of an (...) administrative monarchy in France. It is easy to see that in a considerable sense both historians were working on medieval government, and it is some measure of their achievement that even today no one wishing to be informed in this grand subject can do much better than read Lunt and Strayer. I wish I could discourse on my own years of research as did those admirable scholars. If I cannot, it is not simply because I lack the accumulated erudition to reflect summarily on my work; it is also because I lack the conceptual serenity of my teachers in our common subject matter. Like Lunt and Strayer I have worked on justice, finance, and the beginnings of parliamentary life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; unlike those mentors I became uneasy about the paradigm in which these studies were framed. I came to wonder how Strayer could have held students, myself included, spellbound with details about the deportment of judges or sergeants while saying nothing about the adequacy of concepts like “government” or “administration” to describe such behavior. Believing there was something timeless about the action of people in power, he was gifted at evoking the ways of modern bureaucrats in those “corridors of power” he knew from his own experience in Washington. He assumed with other historians of his day and ours that all societies have governments, so that he could speak of feudalism as essentially a “method of government,” of “political organization … reduced to the simplest possible terms.”. (shrink)

Série de l’ère #MeToo, I May Destroy You de Michaela Coel montre que la violence est une potentialité inhérente à la relation sexuelle. Le viol n’est pas le problème spécifique de la série, mais plutôt le cas extrême et paradigmatique qui donne lieu à une problématisation plus générale de la sexualité ordinaire, en une famille de cas hétérogènes. Le point culminant de la série est la manière dont elle transmue le genre du « Rape and Revenge », en substituant à (...) la vengeance des formes politiques d’action, par la puissance du récit et de la parole publique. (shrink)

Cette nouvelle de politique-fiction imagine un avenir proche où le populisme deviendrait le paradigme du discours politique. Une nouvelle modernité assiste à l’expansion d’une multiplicité de peuples virtuels. Les populismes de droite et de gauche entrent en rivalité : quel est le vrai Peuple? Mais les peuples n’ont pas besoin de populisme, ils ont besoin d’agencement. Qu’est-ce qu’agencer les peuples virtuels qui déchirent nos vies?

Résumé Le 3 octobre 2011, les zombies ont marché sur Wall Street. Cette parade carnavalesque, inspirée par les films de George A. Romero, agite les fantômes des laissés pour compte du capitalisme global. Mais le mythe du zombie est aussi le symbole d’une force politique informe, qui résiste à toute organisation, et sur laquelle se réfléchissent les désirs morts-vivants d’une société.

This article defends a Platonist view of streaming. It is opposite to the mainstream representation that streaming has “liquidated” the structure both objective and collective of musical experience. On the contrary, streaming is the support of a new kind of musical object, which is distinct both from the allographic notational objects and from the phonographic ones. This third kind of object has to be characterized as a flux-object. The way it is diffused and accessible implies a new kind of experience. (...) Cyberspace in which this experience takes place is characterized as an “hyperobjective noosphere”: the relation of streaming with the subjects of musical experience is akin to the relation of atmosphere or biosphere to the living beings. This article invites to an ascetic exercise: the everyday experience of the listener has to become mindful of the “swarm community” in which s/he participates by streaming. Thus it develops a renewed musical Platonism, as a kind of response to “object-oriented ontologies”. According to this renewed Platonism, dispositional properties are essential to the objects. Objects have no sense apart from the relation to individual and collective subjectivations that are potential parts of them. (shrink)

Né à Blois en 1886 et enterré au Caire sous le nom d'Abd el-Wâhed Yahiâ en 1951, René Guénon est l'homme par qui le scandale arrive. Il dénonce la décadence de l'Occident moderne, fruit d'une lente dégénérescence de son héritage métaphysique et se tourne, au grand dam des catholiques, vers l'Orient devenu, selon lui, le refuge ultime de la "Tradition". Cette dernière notion, centrale chez Guénon, élève toutes les traditions religieuses de l'humanité au même niveau de transcendance tout en reconnaissant (...) à chacune d'entre elles sa dimension spirituelle spécifique. Un point de vue tout simplement révolutionnaire dans les années 30. Dès lors, il appartient à l'individu de se déterminer spirituellement par un processus de connaissance graduée qui dépasse largement le seul exercice d'un rite religieux. C'est la voie ésotérique par essence, qui suscitera l'émergence à travers le monde (Europe, Etats-Unis, Russie, etc) d'innombrables"chapelles" initiatiques se réclamant de Guénon, avec notamment les groupes soufis dirigés par Schuon, Vâlsan ou Pallavicini. Chose frappante, un lien inextricable s'est peu à peu tissé entre cette perspective ésotérique et l'horizon politique. En témoignent la "spiritualité héroïque" de Julius Evola dans l'Italie des années trente mais aussi les résonances guénoniennes qu'on découvre dans l'engagement politique de Simone Weil ou de Carl Schmitt. Parallèlement à l'activité des revues Le Voile d'Isis/Etudes Traditionnelles, les apports de Mircea Eliade, d'Henry Corbin ou de Raymond Abellio achèvent de perpétuer le rayonnement guénonien, si controversé soit-il. Cette mise en perspective monumentale de l'oeuvre de René Guénon révèle, de manière décisive, une figure cardinale du XXe siècle et dévoile l'étendue de son rôle dans la construction de la pensée occidentale moderne. (shrink)

Cette nouvelle d’anticipation fantaisiste imagine un futur proche où notre vie quotidienne serait peuplée de robots anthropomorphes entièrement dédiés à l’usage sexuel. Elle spécule sur la manière dont ces robots pourraient peu à peu transformer en profondeur les relations sociales et conditionner l’avènement d’une humanité « post-biologique ». La place des sexo-robots dans la vie quotidienne divise les féministes. Elle révèle des lignes de fracture idéologiques entre le vieil humanisme et une nouvelle métaphysique plus généreuse du rapport homme-machine.

Among the regions where history was written in the early Middle Ages Mediterranean France is hardly conspicuous. South of the Limousin we know of no Flodoard to carry on Frankish annals, no Dudo to celebrate a new people's identity, no William of Poitiers to lionize a conqueror; nor did the twelfth century nurture the likes of Orderic Vitalis or Suger. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a single historian in or of the deep South during the centuries separating the (...) Carolingian annalists of Moissac and Aniane from the singers and narrators of the Albigensian crusades. Neither Adémar de Chabannes nor Geoffroi de Vigeois can be counted as such, although it is true that these Aquitanian writers transmit important traditions on affairs of Gascony and Gothia; neither was primarily concerned with the distant South. Raimond d'Aguilers, canon of Le Puy and chaplain to Count Raimond of Saint-Gilles, for all that he usefully tells of the count's crusading expedition , says little of his homeland. Nor is it simply contemporary historians that are lacking. Auguste Molinier was thinking of records of all kinds when he wrote that in the south of the old Frankish lands “la production historique a été extrêmement peu abondante à l'époque féodale.” For our knowledge of events in the South we have sometimes to rely on northern sources: such is the case with the confraternity of Le Puy in the 1180s. Moreover, northern events as late and as great as Bouvines have no known echo in the South. (shrink)