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Symmetry belongs to one of the basic principles of the beauty of human and non-human objects since antiquity. Even though its significance has been verified by numerous theories and research studies, there is a number of papers suggesting that this principle may be false. The study identifies five major evolutionary principles, in the context of new approaches and research ambiguities based mainly on neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, that support the thesis that highlights the significance of symmetry in the perception and assessment of attractiveness: 1. symmetry as an honest signal of various health characteristics; 2. symmetry as proof of developmental stability; 3. effectiveness; 4. comprehensibility; 5. predictability. In the context of the mechanisms described above it also seeks possible explanations for the existence of contradictory research results related to the attractiveness of symmetry. The outcome of the study is the postulation of three hypotheses: 1. the naturalness hypothesis (symmetry is only attractive to the same degree that it naturally occurs in the subject); 2. the accent hypothesis (minor asymmetries do not disprove the principles of symmetry, they make them more visible); 3. the ecology hypothesis (the attractiveness of symmetry is conditioned by the situation and depends on the type of subject assessed) that allow us to integrate both past and contemporary (and putatively contradictory) research findings. The paper also provides proposals for the verification of the postulated hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a self-paced reading study on German sluicing, Paape (Paape, 2016) found that reading times were shorter at the ellipsis site when the antecedent was a temporarily ambiguous garden-path structure. As a post-hoc explanation of this finding, Paape assumed that the antecedent’s memory representation was reactivated during syntactic reanalysis, making it easier to retrieve. In two eye tracking experiments, we subjected the reactivation hypothesis to further empirical scrutiny. Experiment 1, carried out in French, showed no evidence in favor in the reactivation hypothesis. Instead, results for one out of the three types of garden-path sentences that were tested suggest that subjects sometimes failed to resolve the temporary ambiguity in the antecedent clause, and subsequently failed to resolve the ellipsis. The results of Experiment 2, a conceptual replication of Paape’s (Paape, 2016) original study carried out in German, are compatible with the reactivation hypothesis, but leave open the possibility that the observed speedup for ambiguous antecedents may be due to occasional retrievals of an incorrect structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of studies are investigating the way that aesthetic experiences are generated across different media. Empathy with a perceived human artist has been suggested as a common mechanism []. In this study, people heard 30 s excerpts of ambiguous music and poetry preceded by neutral, positively valenced, or negatively valenced information about the composer's or author’s intent. The information influenced their perception of the excerpts—excerpts paired with positive intent information were perceived as happier and excerpts paired with negative intent information were perceived as sadder (although across intent conditions, musical excerpts were perceived as happier than poetry excerpts). Moreover, the information modulated the aesthetic experience of the excerpts in different ways for the different excerpt types: positive intent information increased enjoyment and the degree to which people found the musical excerpts to be moving, but negative intent information increased these qualities for poetry. Additionally, positive intent information was judged to better match musical excerpts and negative intent information to better match poetic excerpts. These results suggest that empathy with a perceived human artist is indeed an important shared factor across experiences of music and poetry, but that other mechanisms distinguish the generation of aesthetic appreciation between these two media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the question of whether native Mandarin Chinese speakers process and comprehend subject-extracted relative clauses (SRC) more readily than object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) in Mandarin Chinese. Presently, this has been a hotly debated issue, with various studies producing contrasting results. Using two eye-tracking experiments with ambiguous and unambiguous RCs, this study shows that both ORCs and SRCs have different processing requirements depending on the locus and time course during reading. The results reveal that ORC reading was possibly facilitated by linear/temporal integration and canonicity. On the other hand, similarity-based interference made ORCs more difficult, and expectation-based processing was more prominent for unambiguous ORCs. Overall, RC processing in Mandarin should not be broken down to a single ORC (dis)advantage, but understood as multiple interdependent factors influencing whether ORCs are either more difficult or easier to parse depending on the task and context at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to investigate lexical ambiguity resolution during sentence processing in 16 people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and 16 healthy controls. Sentences were presented word-by-word on computer screen, and participants were required to decide if a subsequent target word was related to the meaning of the sentence. The task consisted of related, unrelated and ambiguous trials. For the ambiguous trials, the sentence ended with an ambiguous word and the target was related to one of the meanings of that word, but not the one captured by the sentence context (e.g., ‘He dug with the spade’, Target ‘ACE’). Both groups demonstrated slower reaction times and lower accuracy for the ambiguous condition relative to the unrelated condition, however accuracy was impacted by the ambiguous condition to a larger extent in the PD group. These results suggested that PD patients experience increased difficulties with contextual ambiguity resolution. The ERP results did not reflect increased ambiguity resolution difficulties in PD, as a similar N400 effect was evident for the unrelated and ambiguous condition in both groups. However, the magnitude of the N400 for these conditions was correlated with a measure of inhibition in the PD group, but not the control group. The ERP results suggest that semantic processing may be more compromised in PD patients with increased response inhibition deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental evidence suggests that the frequency with which individuals get feedback information on their investments has an effect on their risk-taking behavior. In particular, when they are given information sufficiently often, they take less risks compared with a situation in which they are informed less frequently. We find that this result still holds when subjects do not know the probabilities of the lotteries they are betting upon. We also detect significant gender effects, in that the frequency with which information is disclosed mostly affects male betting behavior, and that males become more risk-seeking after experiencing a loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neil Armstrong insisted that his quote upon landing on the moon was misheard, and that he had said one small step for a man, instead of one small step for man. What he said is unclear in part because function words like a can be reduced and spectrally indistinguishable from the preceding context. Therefore, their presence can be ambiguous, and they may disappear perceptually depending on the rate of surrounding speech. Two experiments are presented examining production and perception of reduced tokens of for and for a in spontaneous speech. Experiment 1 investigates the distributions of several acoustic features of for and for a. The results suggest that the distributions of for and for a overlap substantially, both in terms of temporal and spectral characteristics. Experiment 2 examines perception of these same tokens when the context speaking rate differs. The perceptibility of the function word a varies as a function of this context speaking rate. These results demonstrate that substantial ambiguity exists in the original quote from Armstrong, and that this ambiguity may be understood through context speaking rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From my perspective as a working artist, both visual art and the connection with religion it enables are experienced non-verbally as at once fluid and deliberately ambiguous. An active spectator willing to engage art in the same way may find the emotional and intellectual space needed for her religion to evolve beyond adherence to existing dogmas. This paper explores the kind of theorizing within religion made possible by the process of making art with special reference to the creation of an artwork for the sanctuary of a church. After describing such examples from my own art and religion practice, I identify the theoretical ideas from phenomenology and neuroscience that have most influenced my work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When asked to indicate which items from a set of candidates belong to a particular natural language category inter-individual differences occur: Individuals disagree which items should be considered category members. The premise of this paper is that these inter-individual differences in semantic categorization reflect both ambiguity and vagueness. Categorization differences are said to be due to ambiguity when individuals employ different criteria for categorization. For instance, individuals may disagree whether hiking or darts is the better example of sports because they emphasize respectively whether an activity is strenuous and whether rules apply. Categorization differences are said to be due to vagueness when individuals employ different cut-offs for separating members from non-members. For instance, the decision to include hiking in the sports category or not, may hinge on how strenuous different individuals require sports to be. This claim is supported by the application of a mixture model to categorization data for eight natural language categories. The mixture model can identify latent groups of categorizers who regard different items likely category members (i.e., ambiguity) with categorizers within each of the groups differing in their propensity to provide membership responses (i.e., vagueness). The identified subgroups are shown to emphasize different sets of category attributes when making their categorization decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]