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Що означає «опрацювання минулого» : (переклад з німецької, анотація і післямова Віталія Брижніка)
(2018)
Роботу «Що означає «опрацювання Минулого» Адорно вперше прочитав як доповідь 6 листопада 1959 року перед Координаційною радою з питань християнсько-єврейської співпраці. У цій доповіді Адорно розглянув суть соціальної ідеології, панівної в повоєнній Німеччині, яка зумовлювала стратегії суспільного примирення з політичними злочинами колишньої націонал-соціалістичної влади. На думку філософа, соціальна ідеологія суспільства споживання використовує чималу кількість відповідних засобів, аби стабілізувати свій панівний статус у суспільстві. Й передусім вона намагається ліквідувати колективну історичну пам’ять людей про жахи воєнного періоду, прагнучи витиснути їх із колективної свідомості, зокрема й завдяки спогадам людей про «кращі часи» життя під «опікою» попередньої, тоталітарної влади. Філософ назвав суроґатною ідентичність цих людей, соціально інтеґрованих лише завдяки авторитету владної особистості. Вони не ототожнюють себе з жертвами тоталітарного режиму через уплив на їхню свідомість культурних елементів цієї соціальної ідеології. Іншим наслідком даного впливу також стає відчуження цих людей від ідеї демократії як чинника належних соціокультурних перетворень. Дієвим засобом подолання цього впливу Адорно визначив нову, «демократичну педагогіку» і просвіту як «другу освіту», що практично здійснюють у суспільстві освічені люди, які володіють знанням про минулі злочини тоталітарного режиму. Тим самим вони зумовлюють у межах освітнього процесу дієве «опрацювання Минулого» через формування особистого розуміння окремої людини соціальних причин і жахливих наслідків панування тоталітарного режиму. Це ліквідує її «політичне неповноліття» й тим самим унеможливлює історичне повторення в Європі злочинів авторитарної влади.
My paper will explore the interrelation between past, present and identity, as well as the dynamics of social change in contemporary German and Romanian literature, as exemplified by Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder (2002) and Ioana Bradea’s Scotch (2010). Both authors belong to a new generation of writers who, having experienced the collapse of the communist regime as adolescents, investigate the traumatic experience of change and adjustment to the social, economic and cultural realities of post-communist societies. While Hensel aims at recreating the lost Heimat (motherland) as an Erinnerungsraum (space of remembrance) and portraying the social tensions of the post-unification decade from an Eastern German perspective, Bradea focuses on depicting the desolate post-communist industrial landscape, as well as the everyday lives of anonymous Romanians caught in the vagaries of transition.
Our mind has the function of representing the physical and social world we are in, so that we can efficiently interact with it. This results in a constant and dynamic interaction between mind and world that produces a balance when representations are at the same time accurate with respect to what the world is communicating to our organism, but also compatible with how our mind works.
A paradigmatic case of this interaction is offered by perception, which is the mental function that represents contingent aspects of the world built from what is captured by our senses. Indeed, the dominant philosophical view in cognitive science is that our perceptual states are representations of the world and not direct access to that world. These representational perceptual states therefor include the aspects of the world they represent and that initiate the perception by stimulating our sensory organs.
Perceptual representations are built using information from the sensory system, i.e., bottom-up information, but are also integrated with information previously acquired, i.e., top-down information, so that perception interacts with memory through language and other mental functions. Such organization is believed to reflect a general mechanism of our mind/brain, which is to acquire and use information to make efficient predictions about the future, continuously updating older information with present information.
This predictive processing works because the world is not random, but shows a regular structure from which reliable expectations can be built. One way that our minds make these predictions is by adapting to the structure of the world in an implicit, automatic and unconscious way, a process that has been called Implicit Statistical Learning (ISL). ISL is a learning process that does not require awareness and happens in an incidental and spontaneous way, with mere exposure to statistical regularities of the world. It is what happens when we learn a language during early childhood, and that allows us to be implicitly sensitive to the phonological structure of speech, or to associate speech patterns with objects and events to learn word meaning.
A specific case of ISL is the learning of spatial configuration in the visual world, which we apply to abstract arrays of items, but most importantly, also to more ecological settings such as the visual scenes we are immersed in during our everyday life. The knowledge we acquire about the structure of visual scenes has been called “Scene Grammar”, because it informs about presence and position of objects in a similar way to what linguistic grammar tells us about the presence and position of words. So, we implicitly acquire the semantics of scenes, learning which objects are consistent with a certain scene, as well as the syntax of scenes, learning where objects are positioned in a consistent way within a certain scene.
More recent developments have proposed that scene grammar knowledge might be organized based on a hierarchical system: objects are arranged in the scene, which offers the more general context, but within a scene we can identify different spatial and functional clusters of objects, called “phrases”, that offer a second level of context; within every phrase, then, objects have different status, with usually one object (“anchor object”) offering strong prediction of where and which are the other objects within the phrase (“local objects”). However, these further aspects of the organization of objects In scenes remain poorly understood.
Another problem relates to the way we measure the structure of scenes to compare the organization of the visual world with the organization in the mind. Typically, to decide if an object appears or not in a certain scene, and whether or not it appears in a certain position within a scene, researchers based their decision on intuition and common-sense, maybe validating those decisions with independent raters. But it has been shown that often these decisions can be limited and more complex information about objects’ arrangement in scenes can be lost.
A potential solution to this problem might be using large set of real-world images, that have annotations and segmentations of objects, to measures statistics about how objects are arranged in the environment. This idea exploits the nowadays larger availability of this kind of datasets due to increasing developments of computer vision algorithms, and also parallels with the established usage of large text corpora in language research.
The goals of the current investigation were to extract object statistics from this image datasets and test if they reliably predict behavioural responses during object processing, as well as to use these statistics to investigate more complex aspects of scene grammar, such as its hierarchical organization, to see if this organization is reflected in the organization of objects in our mind.
The neuroendocrine substance melatonin is a hormone synthesized rhythmically by the pineal gland under the influence of the circadian system and alternating light/dark cycles. Melatonin has been shown to have broad applications, and consequently becoming a molecule of great controversy. Undoubtedly, however, melatonin plays an important role as a time cue for the endogenous circadian system. This review focuses on melatonin as a regulator in the circadian modulation of memory processing. Memory processes (acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval) are modulated by the circadian system. However, the mechanism by which the biological clock is rhythmically influencing cognitive processes remains unknown. We also discuss, how the circadian system by generating cycling melatonin levels can implant information about daytime into memory processing, depicted as day and nighttime differences in acquisition, memory consolidation and/or retrieval.
This essay discusses the current Europeanization of national museums in different European countries and considers it against the background of media theories and feminist epistemologies. Taking the example of the European Solidarity Centre Gdansk, the Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin and the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée Marseille, it suggests two approaches to the dynamics of travel and locatedness in the museum. Firstly, using the concept of what I call “Europoeic media” this essay shows how “Europe” as a travelling memory is shaped by and in media. Secondly, I argue that the locatedness both of memories and the memory researcher are not detrimental but instead produce “situated knowledges”. Thus, in combining media-sensitivity and standpoint-reflexivity, the paper proposes new ways of taking into account the travels and locatedness of both memories and memory research.
In the insect brain, the mushroom body is a higher order brain area that is key to memory formation and sensory processing. Mushroom body (MB) extrinsic neurons leaving the output region of the MB, the lobes and the peduncle, are thought to be especially important in these processes. In the honeybee brain, a distinct class of MB extrinsic neurons, A3 neurons, are implicated in playing a role in learning. Their MB arborisations are either restricted to the lobes and the peduncle, here called A3 lobe connecting neurons, or they provide feedback information from the lobes to the input region of the MB, the calyces, here called A3 feedback neurons. In this study, we analyzed the morphology of individual A3 lobe connecting and feedback neurons using confocal imaging. A3 feedback neurons were previously assumed to innervate each lip compartment homogenously. We demonstrate here that A3 feedback neurons do not innervate whole subcompartments, but rather innervate zones of varying sizes in the MB lip, collar, and basal ring. We describe for the first time the anatomical details of A3 lobe connecting neurons and show that their connection pattern in the lobes resemble those of A3 feedback cells. Previous studies showed that A3 feedback neurons mostly connect zones of the vertical lobe that receive input from Kenyon cells of distinct calycal subcompartments with the corresponding subcompartments of the calyces. We can show that this also applies to the neck of the peduncle and the medial lobe, where both types of A3 neurons arborize only in corresponding zones in the calycal subcompartments. Some A3 lobe connecting neurons however connect multiple vertical lobe areas. Contrarily, in the medial lobe, the A3 neurons only innervate one division. We found evidence for both input and output areas in the vertical lobe. Thus, A3 neurons are more diverse than previously thought. The understanding of their detailed anatomy might enable us to derive circuit models for learning and memory and test physiological data.
From age 5 to 7, there are remarkable improvements in children’s cognitive abilities (“5–7 shift”). In many countries, including Germany, formal schooling begins in this age range. It is, thus, unclear to what extent exposure to formal schooling contributes to the “5–7 shift.” In this longitudinal study, we investigated if schooling acts as a catalyst of maturation. We tested 5-year-old children who were born close to the official cutoff date for school entry and who were still attending a play-oriented kindergarten. One year later, the children were tested again. Some of the children had experienced their first year of schooling whereas the others had remained in kindergarten. Using 2 functional magnetic resonance imaging tasks that assessed episodic memory formation (i.e., subsequent memory effect), we found that children relied strongly on the medial temporal lobe (MTL) at both time points but not on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In contrast, older children and adults typically show subsequent memory effects in both MTL and PFC. Both children groups improved in their memory performance, but there were no longitudinal changes nor group differences in neural activation. We conclude that successful memory formation in this age group relies more heavily on the MTL than in older age groups.
Uwe Timm and Robert Schiff have both written an autobiographical text dealing with the premature death of an elder brother who was a combattant in the Waffen-SS in their childhood. Despite the frappantly similar biographical constellation, there are differences in narrative technique and thematical focus that stem from their respective sociocultural context. The analysis shows that Timm is in many ways a representative author of the German ‘68 generation that critically reevaluates the attitude of their parents during the national socialist period and points to omissions and falsifications in the oral family history, while the narration of Schiff, an emigrated author born in the pre-war milieu of the German minority of Southwest Romania, is mainly a reconstruction of the impact of big history on his childhood and thus also the effort to conserve the memory of a world that has passed away and to reconcile himself with the experience of loss.
Persistent neuropathic pain is a frequent consequence of peripheral nerve injuries, particularly in the elderly. Using the IntelliCage we studied if sciatic nerve injury obstructed learning and memory in young and aged mice, each in wild type and progranulin deficient mice, which develop premature signs of brain aging. Both young and aged mice developed long-term nerve injury-evoked hyperalgesia and allodynia. In both genotypes, aged mice with neuropathic pain showed high error rates in place avoidance acquisition tasks. However, once learnt, these aged mice with neuropathic pain showed a significantly stronger maintenance of the aversive memory. Nerve injury did not affect place preference behavior in neither genotype, neither in young nor aged mice. However, nerve injury in progranulin deficient mice impaired the learning of spatial sequences of awarded places, particularly in the aged mice. This task required a discrimination of clockwise and anti-clockwise sequences. The chaining failure occurred only in progranulin deficient mice after nerve injury, but not in sham operated or wildtype mice, suggesting that progranulin was particularly important for compensatory adaptations after nerve injury. In contrast, all aged mice with neuropathic pain, irrespective of the genotype, had a long maintenance of aversive memory suggesting a negative alliance and possibly mutual aggravation of chronic neuropathic pain and aversive memory at old age.
Recent psychophysical research supports the notion that horizontal information of a face is primarily important for facial identity processes. Even though this has been demonstrated to be valid for young adults, the concept of horizontal information as primary informative source has not yet been applied to older adults’ ability to correctly identify faces. In the current paper, the role different filtering methods might play in an identity processing task is examined for young and old adults, both taken from student populations. Contrary to most findings in the field of developmental face perception, only a near-significant age effect is apparent in upright and un-manipulated presentation of stimuli, whereas a bigger difference between age groups can be observed for a condition which removes all but horizontal information of a face. It is concluded that a critical feature of human face perception, the preferential processing of horizontal information, is less efficient past the age of 60 and is involved in recognition processes that undergo age-related decline usually found in the literature.