Kant’s distinction between different uses of judgments – determining and reflecting – sheds light on two areas of recent debates about thought experiments as a method: (1) the question of bizarre cases and (2) the problem of missing context. On the question of bizarre cases, I show how a Kantian explains why it is sometimes acceptable for thought experiments to be far-fetched. For philosophical problems that call for reflecting judgment (i.e., the creation or discovery of new concepts), bizarre cases can be particularly effective. The problem of bizarre cases is closely related to the problem of missing context, which is another common objection to their use. The problem is that readers are often left to fill in background context that might be relevant for how they evaluate the thought experiment scenario. I will argue that missing context is a problem only if readers evaluate scenarios based on their prior knowledge and familiar experience. If instead, as I claim, the fictional case makes a new presentation possible, the additional context may be irrelevant and might distract from the presentation the thought experiment is designed to recreate.

The ability to express and perceive vocal emotions plays an important role in social interactions. Notably, the encoding and decoding of emotions often occur in social interactions of persons of different ages, where speaker and listener characteristics dynamically shape the perception of emotion expressed in the voice. However, existing models of (emotional) voice processing have primarily focused on stimulus quality while accounting sparsely for person characteristics, such as speaker and listener age. Consequently, systematic research on the expression and perception of emotion in the voice across the lifespan is needed. Here, we provide a synopsis of how the perception and specifically the recognition of vocal emotions is modulated by the age of both speakers and listeners. First, we summarize what we currently know about human vocal tract development and age-related variations in voice acoustics. We then synthesize evidence on age-related changes in the expression and perception of vocal emotions. We conclude that the perception of emotion expressed in the voice is not only a matter of how one speaks but also of who speaks and who listens. A broader perspective on how the voice communicates emotions should be reflected in existing models and guide future research.

The TOT state shares characteristics and empirical patterns with many other cognitive phenomena. Among these shared characteristics are resolution patterns, as in the case of creative problem-solving and the factors that both hinder and contribute to resolution in that domain, and the feeling of closeness that characterizes many subjective metacognitive states (including presque vu, curiosity, familiarity sensations and feelings of knowing). Finally, the TOT state appears to be related to the notion of internally directed cognition, possibly as a window onto how attentional processes are modulated to focus inward vs. outward. Continuing to research the TOT phenomenon could shed important light on broader issues of human cognition, including mechanisms of creative thought, attentional modulation, and the basis of subjective states of awareness in metacognition.

Chapter 14 presents a dynamic model of long-term, art historical trends and shows the complexity of overlapping styles and movements. It is based on a modification af a dynamic model of development on the timescale of the human life course. The basic evolution rules are those of simultaneously operating processes of consolidation of the status quo and processes of innovation driven by a familiarity-novelty optimum. The simulation explores different scenarios, one of which generates the typical art-historical pattern of overlapping continuous as well as discontinuous processes.

This chapter focuses on the timing of brain activity associated with long-term memory. The chapter begins by introducing ERP activations that have been associated with familiarity and recollection. Familiarity has been associated with activity in frontal brain regions 300–500 milliseconds after stimulus onset, while recollection has been associated with activity in parietal brain regions 500–800 milliseconds after stimulus onset. In Section 4.2, a scientific debate that has focused on the ERP activity associated with familiarity is discussed. In Section 4.3, it is shown that synchronous activity in two different brain regions (i.e., activation time courses that increase and decrease together) indicates that these regions interact. Such synchronous activity between regions during long-term memory typically occurs within the theta frequency band, the alpha frequency band, and the gamma frequency band. Section 4.4 details some intriguing intracranial EEG findings based on recording activity in the hippocampus and the parahippocampal gyrus.

Investigations of the contribution of controlled versus automatic information processing are presented using two superficially different procedures as examples: visual search and episodic recognition memory. Whereas most frameworks consider the possibility that tasks may be performed either in a controlled fashion or automatically, the General Theory assumes that both types of information processing may contribute to their performance. Thus, the empirical question is the extent to which each type of information processing contributes to task performance and under what conditions.

Distance is a central concern for global historians. It is a physical and external condition of social life that global processes bridge. Exchanges, encounters and conflicts between strangers are common themes of global historians. Distance is also a cultural and conceptual condition, one that defines relations between strangers far – and near. Mobility and the advent of new modes of transportation and communications had ambiguous effects of closing the gap between strangers while heightening social distances, the need to explain them and policies to redress them.

This chapter discusses the poetics of familiarity embodied in the Romantic essay. It locates the origins of that poetics in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ of 1800 and 1802 to Lyrical Ballads. Responding in turn to the famous preface, the three most notable ‘familiar’ essayists of the era, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, revise a manifesto for poetry into one for prose, a celebration of nature into a proclamation of the city. In their practice, the familiar essay becomes the exemplary form of urban expression in the Romantic era. The characteristic procedure of the essay is the slide from the familiar to the ideal and back again, by directly articulating the ideal bearing of the familiar subject, or by a range of other idealising (and essayistic) strategies.

The Attraction emotions are reactions of liking or disliking objects (or aspects of objects) resulting from an object’s appeal (or lack thereof). Appeal, in turn, depends on tastes, which in contrast to goals and standards, tend to be unanalyzable, Hence, the Attraction emotions are the least cognitively complex of all emotions. Tastes are treated broadly and include attitudes and preferences, and the notion of an object is also broad, including anything that is evaluated qua object, meaning that even events or agents’ actions can be viewed as objects. Although issues pertaining to aesthetic judgment are raised, they are not the focus of Attraction emotions. The Attraction emotion identified depends on whether an object is evaluated as being appealing or unappealing and whether it is viewed as itself being capable of emotion. Crossing these dimensions leads to four emotion types: “Affection” and “Enmity” emotions, which pertain to emotion-capable (generally animate) objects, and “Appreciation” and “Distaste” emotions, which pertain to emotion-incapable (generally inanimate) objects.

The chapter’s focus is on the effect of task design and implementation conditionson fluency, including task design, implementation conditions and the role of interlocutors. The intention is to highlight the value of adapting research and teaching to use tasks for promoting fluency in real-world communication, taking account of pragmatic demands and cultural norms. We suggest ways in which tasks can be better used to investigate fluency, not only from an information processing perspective, but through an interactional lens, exploring speakers’ communicative strategies in fulfilling listeners’ expectations and communicative needs.

Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.

Scholars haveestablished that Rome is at once a place and an idea. This double formula, however, which limits Rome to a specific distant place (distant, that is, from the perspective of Britain) and an idea (that is, an immaterial concept or notion of that distant place), needs to be supplemented by an acknowledgement that the Roman Empire had left in its wake material remains and cultural practices that ensured that Rome could always be close-to-hand, familiar, and domestic—even a thousand or more miles from the Eternal City. Ruins, roads, the Latin language and the thickets of its grammar, cultural and spiritual institutions, liturgical texts and devotional regimens: these phenomena ensured that Rome could be, even as far away as Medieval or Renaissance Britain, experienced as near rather than far, and as a network of material remains and cultural practices rather than as an abstract idea. The book gathers these disparate phenomena under the rubric of the ‘fact’ of Rome (with an eye to the word’s derivation from the Latin factum) in an effort to show that lives lived in Medieval and Renaissance Britain were continually immersed in versions of Rome that oscillated between conspicuousness and invisibility.

Age-related changes in memory are a common but worrisome occurrence in many people’s lives. However, these changes are not ubiquitous. Healthy aging appears to impact memory for associative/relational details, i.e., the ability to recollect, more so than memory for item information. We propose that alterations in the recruitment of prefrontally mediated cognitive control processes, such as strategy use and inhibitory control, underlie these age-related memory deficits in healthy adults. These processes are particularly critical for remembering specific relational details and for being able to resolve interference between competing memories. Critically, evidence suggests that while there are large individual differences in the impact of aging on memory, various methods of support/intervention can improve memory performance in healthy older adults. We discuss how recent developments in neuroscience analysis methods have enhanced our understanding of how aging affects the control processes that support episodic learning and retrieval. We further suggest that future studies should test more diverse samples of adults and assess the role of lifestyle factors on individual differences in patterns of episodic memory performance and supporting brain activity and structure.