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The enjoyment of live magic and it's relation to other forms of entertainment
Get PDFMagic is a performance art that allows us to experience the impossible. We present data from a questionnaire-based study that examined how the liveness and social and physical proximities of a magic performance affects people’s enjoyment of magic and how this relates to other forms of entertainment. Participants preferred magic performances that were live to when they were presented on video, but this preference for live performances was also found for dance, theatre, visual arts and sport, but not for film music and comedy. People’s enjoyment of live magic correlated positively with all other forms of entertainment except music at home, film on TV and sports on TV. Watching magic on TV correlated positively with all the other forms of entertainment except live dance, live music, live plays, film on TV and at the cinema. Regression analysis showed that people’s enjoyment for live and video magic were driven by different factors. Enjoyment for live magic was negatively predicted by watching stand-up comedy and sports on TV. Live stand-up comedy, live sport and live dance and film at the cinema all contributed positively to people’s enjoyment of live magic. Watching magic live was the strongest predictor enjoyment of watching magic on TV, followed by stand-up comedy on TV, dance live, dance TV, sport TV play TV, sport live, and film on TV. Live dance and sports were negative predictors, implying that increase enjoyment in these forms of entertainment predicted lower levels of enjoyment of magic on TV
Mycorrhizal Movements: A Conversation with Giuliana Furci
Get PDFIn this multifaceted conversation, field mycologist and Fungi Foundation founder Giuliana Furci reflects on the political, ethical, and spiritual dimensions of fungal life. Speaking from decades of grassroots activism and fieldwork, Furci discusses the importance of language, relational ethics, and ancestral knowledge in mycological and ethnomycological research. She shares insights into the development of the world’s first ethnomycological ethical guidelines, the recovery and stewardship of the Historias y Memorias Mazatecas archive, and the role of fungi in deconstructing colonial and anthropocentric epistemologies. Touching on themes of rotting, symbiosis, identity, and the metaphysics of decomposition, Furci offers a visionary account of fungal co-existence, one that foregrounds discipline, reverence, and long-term, multispecies commitment to planetary care
Gendered Mobilisations in the (Re)Making of Nationalisms
Get PDFA review essay on the book Women, Gender and Religious Nationalism edited by Amrita Basu and Tanika Sarkar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 202
Squeeze The Pain Away: Using a Wireless Ball to Measure Efforts to Reduce Other’s Pain Expressions in VR
Get PDFVirtual reality has often been used as a tool to study empathy. However, few studies have explored users’ willingness to make physical effort to actively reduce others’ pain. We developed a pipeline that integrates a wireless stress ball into a VR environment. This device measures continuous grip force, enabling participants to adjust a virtual character’s pain expressions through squeezing: the harder they squeeze, the less intense the pain expressions become in real-time. This shifts the participants’ focus from passive observation to active participation. Our results indicated that participants were highly motivated to use the ball to reduce virtual characters’ pain and showed particularly high use of effort in the first 10 seconds of a 15-second trial. Eye-tracking data revealed that participants focused primarily on pain-related facial features, consistent with previous pain decoding studies. Our effort-based approach offers a novel method to study pain perception
Dramaturgical Potential: Is it necessary?
Get PDFThe essay’s title question (“Is it necessary?”) offers a kind of manifesto for thinking through the appeal of and to dramaturgy in performance making, exploring conditions of translation in which this question may be explored in its manifold potential. Informed by my own teaching experience, this concern is both practical and conceptual, reflecting on the translatability of the very word, dramaturgy, where the resonance of the Greek—in its vernacular assimilation—lends a canonical aura to its (being) thought. Distinct from the Greek philosophical resource in European languages, how might this resonance change when translation also concerns thinking through the theme of potential with a Chinese source such as the Tao Te Ching? It is in this context that the question of necessity in my title broaches that of its own potential in (and as) the work of translation
Servants of the State: Integration as a Form of Institutional Policing
Get PDFReview of Amir-Moazami, Schirin (2022), Interrogating Muslims: The Liberal-Secular Matrix of Integration. London: Bloomsbury
Towards Greater Computational Modeling in Neurocognitive Creativity Research
Get PDFCreative cognition is the driving force behind all cultural and scientific progress. In recent years, the field of neurocognitive creativity research (NCR) has made considerable progress in revealing the neural and psychological correlates of creative cognition. However, a detailed understanding of how cognitive processes produce creative ideas, and how these processes interact differently across tasks and individuals, remains elusive. In this article, we argue that the increased adoption of computational modeling can help greatly in achieving this goal. While the verbal theories guiding NCR have evolved from broader accounts into more specific descriptions of neurocognitive processes, they remain more open to interpretation and harder to falsify than formal models. Translating theories into computational models can make them more concrete, accessible, and easier to compare, and helps researchers to develop causal hypotheses for how variation in cognitive factors leads to variation in creative outcomes. Currently, however, computational modeling of creativity is conducted almost entirely separately from NCR, and few attempts have been made to embody the cognitive theories of NCR in models that can simulate performance on common lab-based tasks. In this paper, we discuss theories of creative cognition and how they might benefit from the wider adoption of formal modeling. We also examine recent computational models of creativity and how these might be improved and better integrated with NCR. Finally, we describe a pathway toward a mechanistic understanding of creative cognition through the integration of computational modeling, psychological theory, and empirical research, outlining an example model based on dual-process accounts
Book Review: Made in Hong Kong: Studies in Popular Music
Get PDFReview of Made in Hong Kong: Studies in Popular Music, edited by Anthony Fung and Alice Chi
Appearances can be deceiving: How naturalistic changes to target appearance impact on lineup-based decision making
Get PDFThe present study examined the influence of appearance, procedure and position on identification decisions, post-decisional confidence ratings and estimates of discrimination and confidence-specific accuracy. Regarding appearance, the study examined the combined influence of three naturalistic changes that occur day-to-day (i.e., a reduction in cranial hair length, the removal of stubble, and a change of clothing), two of which have not been considered before in a lineup-decision context. Participants (N = 350) completed four experimental lineups which involved: viewing a target person, completing a brief distractor task, and making an identification decision and a post-decisional confidence rating from a photographic lineup. Participants were randomly allocated to complete simultaneous or sequential lineups, with appearance (no change, change), position (early, late) and target (present, absent) systematically varied across the four trials. Appearance affected all dependent measures and was particularly influential in target present lineups. Naturalistic changes to target appearance reliably decreased correct identification rates, confidence in correct identifications, discrimination accuracy, and confidence-specific accuracy. Procedure and position, by contrast, had a more limited impact. Of concern for the criminal justice system, neither procedure nor position manipulations offset any reductions in lineup-decision accuracy when target appearance changed