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‘I just felt we were shadows': scope and limits of participation by bereaved families in coroners’ inquests in England and Wales
Full text linkA long-standing legal principle in England and Wales is that members of the public should be able to participate effectively in court proceedings that directly concern them. This paper examines the application of this principle to the role of family in coroners’ inquests, which investigate violent, unnatural and unexplained deaths, and deaths which have occurred in state detention.
Close family members of the deceased person have rights to participate in the inquest, and there is a widely stated policy goal that the bereaved should be ‘at the heart’ of the coronial process. Empirical research examining lay and professional experiences of inquests found that participation was deemed important as a means of acknowledging the grief of the bereaved and personhood of the deceased, and on the basis that it contributes to accurate fact-finding and effective outcomes. The research also found, however, that practical and procedural barriers to participation often leave bereaved family feeling excluded and denied a voice, compounding their pain and distress. If these barriers are to be overcome, there must be courtroom reform, clarification and better communication of the inquest’s purpose, and a cultural shift towards putting humanity at the heart of the process
How home exams and peers affect college grades in unprecedented times
No full textLeveraging administrative data from the University of Iceland, which cover more than 60% of the undergraduate population in the country, we examine how home exams and peer networks shape grades around the COVID-19 crisis. Using difference-in-difference models with a rich set of fixed effects, we find that home exams taken during university closures raised grades by about 0.5 points relative to invigilated in-person exams outside the pandemic period. Access to a larger share of high-school peers leads to an average grade increase of up to two-fifths of a point, and exposure to higher-quality peers yielded additional, but smaller gains. Interactions between peer-network measures and the COVID/home-exam indicators are near zero, providing no evidence that peer networks amplified home-exam gains during the pandemic.
Tinna Laufey a
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Marco b
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Ásthildur M. a
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Gylfi Zoega a c
Individual differences in perception of prosody in Mandarin-accented speech are linked to pitch perception, melody memory, musical training, and neural encoding of sound
Full text linkThere are large differences across individuals in the ability to perceive foreign-accented speech, and the sources of this variability are poorly understood. Here we tested the hypothesis that individual differences in auditory processing help drive variability in accented speech perception. We asked L1 English speakers to perceive prosodic features in Mandarin-accented English. Individuals who could precisely discriminate pitch and accurately remember melodic sequences, and who placed more emphasis on pitch information during prosodic categorization, were better able to perceive Mandarin-accented speech. Individuals with more musical training also demonstrated enhanced Mandarin-accented speech perception. Finally, we found that better Mandarin-accented speech perception was linked to more robust neural encoding of speech harmonics. These findings suggest that the precision of sound perception and robustness of memory for sound sequences are major factors driving variability in accented speech perception, and so auditory training could potentially help remediate poor perception of accented speech
Researching body perception: towards an integration of quantitative and qualitative interdisciplinary approaches to address the multiplicity of bodily experiences
Full text linkExperimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience have attempted to understand the underlying functioning of one's body experience. This has resulted in standardised methods involving multisensory manipulations and physiological, behavioural and subjective measures. These approaches contribute to the important goal of creating a cumulative and reproducible science. However, they may sometimes lead to some well-known pitfalls; most notably, construct ambiguity, measure dissociations, and loss of nuance. In this argumentative work, we propose that combining qualitative methods employed in design research centred on body experiences, together with quantitative approaches from psychology and cognitive neuroscience, can yield a richer account without compromising quantitative rigour. This integration of quantitative and qualitative methods, we argue, may be particularly valuable when dealing with one's body perception. Without pretending to fundamentally solve methodological discrepancies between qualitative and quantitative approaches, we propose a conciliatory take. We propose a three-staged integration model that may be mapped to three common steps of the research inquiry: the experimental design, data collection, and data analysis. We further provide a synthesis of qualitative tools and methods to support the explicit reporting of exploratory practices that often remain informal in quantitative research. Our suggested mixed methods approach aims to account for individual differences, produce more nuanced insights, increase transparency, foster multidisciplinarity, and potentially speed progress in some aspects of the research program
Speech perception strategies shift instantly
Full text linkTo perceive speech listeners must decide how to priori ze informa on from mul ple acous c dimensions. Over the course of language learning, individuals form stable perceptual strategies which reflect the strength of the sta s cal rela onship between values along par cular acous c dimensions and linguis c categories. Despite this underlying stability, listeners will change their strategies in response to evidence about shi s in the reliability of acous c dimensions as cues to categoriza on. Here we show that such changes are maximally efficient: listeners will make small adjustments to their strategies a er hearing just a single smulus in which the rela onship between acous c cues diverges from the expected pa ern. Furthermore, these shi s in strategy vanish as quickly as they appear, las ng only a single trial before returning to baseline. Finally, we show that shi s in cue weigh ng are resistant to distrac on, occurring equally when speech is presented in quiet versus in informa onal masking. Speech percep on strategies, therefore, are characterized by short-term fluctua on and long-term stability
Global remapping of the Sensory Homunculus emerges early in childhood development
Full text linkSome of the most dramatic examples of neuroplasticity in the human brain follow congenital sensory deprivation, yet the plasticity mechanisms producing this large-scale cortical remapping remain poorly understood. Congenital malformation of the upper-limb provides a unique temporal dissociation of developmental plasticity mechanisms: While sensory deprivation from the absent hand is triggered before birth, compensatory motor behaviours develop gradually throughout childhood. Using paediatric neuroimaging and semi-ecological behavioural analysis in children (5-7 years old) and adults (>25 years old) with unilateral upper-limb congenital limb difference, we studied deprivation- and use-dependent plasticity in the deprived primary somatosensory cortex and beyond. We reveal that global remapping, encompassing the entire sensory homunculus, is established early and maintained in adulthood. Modelling indicates that deprivation-driven homeostatic plasticity can account for this global remapping. Hebbian-based compensatory learning further contributes to the magnitude of inter-individual differences observed at both childhood and adulthood. Our findings emphasise the early establishment and stability of cortical maps, despite extensive daily-life behavioural adaptation
Understanding care worker well-being and job satisfaction: the influence of intergenerational contact and aging anxiety
Full text linkResearch on contact between care workers and care home residents indicates that positive intergroup
contact experiences by care workers are associated with their attitudes toward, and perceptions of,
older people. Less is known about the implications of contact for care workers themselves. This
study considers the potential impact of contact on care workers’ anxieties about their own aging,
and the implications of such anxiety for their subjective well-being and job satisfaction. One hundred
and forty-four care workers from 18 UK residential care homes completed surveys about their
experiences of contact, aging anxiety, well-being, and satisfaction. Consistent with expectations from
intergroup contact theory, tests of indirect effects showed that care workers who experienced more
positive contact were also less anxious about their own aging. Specifically, psychological concerns
mediated the effects of contact on subjective well-being, whereas fear of old people mediated the
effects of contact on job satisfaction. In contrast, exploratory analysis of the reverse sequence of
mediation (anxiety affecting satisfaction or well-being via contact experiences) showed no statistical
support. Implications for intergroup contact theory and practical implications for supporting care
workers to have more positive contact and less aging anxiety are discussed
Structure and There Is No Antimemetics Division
Full text linkSome notes on There Is No Antimemetics Divisio
Graphesthesia on human fingernails
Full text linkThe fingernails have been considered passive support structures that enhance tactile sensitivity by providing a rigid background, preventing the fingertips from slipping when interacting with objects. Recent studies have provided evidence that the people can perform basic tactile judgments of stimuli applied to the fingernails. In this study, we investigate whether fingernails also contribute to more complex, higher-order spatial processing. Specifically, we examine graphesthesia – the ability to recognise shapes or letters traced onto the skin – and assess whether this tactile capacity extends to the fingernail. Participants were asked to discriminate between the letters b, d, p, and q drawn either on the left middle fingertip or fingernail. Results showed that graphesthetic performance was lower on the fingernail compared to the fingertip. However, participants were still able to classify letters drawn on the fingernail at levels significantly above chance. These findings align with theoretical claims that the fingernail plays a role in perception and expand the growing body of evidence supporting its perceptual functions highlighting the fingernail as an active contributor to complex spatial processing in touch perception
Public communication alters private confidence
Full text linkWe use our private feelings of confidence to coordinate our public, social lives. When making joint decisions we can share our uncertainty honestly to reach an accurate consensus, or exaggerate our confidence to increase our influence on the group. Some theories in cognitive neuroscience suggest that we can strategically distort the confidence we express to others while leaving our private feelings unchanged, but recently we hypothesised that our interactions with others may be a key source of beliefs about uncertainty in our own minds. Consistent with this idea, we show that changes in how we publicly communicate our confidence to others can lead to changes in private confidence when we’re alone. Combining behavioural experiments and computational modelling reveals how the dynamics of social interaction can shape our sense of confidence, and suggests a mechanism that could explain the emergence and persistence of confidence biases in interacting groups
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