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Object detection and identification are fundamental to human vision, and there is mounting evidence that objects guide the allocation of visual attention. However, the role of objects in tasks involving multiple modalities is less clear. To address this question, we investigate object naming, a task in which participants have to verbally identify objects they see in photorealistic scenes. We report an eye-tracking study that investigates which features (attentional, visual, and linguistic) influence object naming. We need that the amount of visual attention directed towards an object, its position and saliency, along with linguistic factors such as word frequency, animacy, and semantic proximity, significantly influence whether the object will be named or not. We then ask how features from different modalities are combined during naming, and significant interactions between saliency and position, saliency and linguistic features,and attention and position. We conclude that when the cognitive systemperforms tasks such as object naming, it uses input from one modalityto constraint or enhance the processing of other modalities, rather thanprocessing each input modality independently.

The lexicons of human languages organize their units at two distinct levels. At a first combinatorial level, meaningless forms (typically referred to as phonemes) are combined into meaningful units (typically referred to as morphemes). Thanks to this, many morphemes can be obtained by relatively simple combinations of a small number of phonemes. At a second compositional level of the lexicon, morphemes are composed into larger lexical units, the meaning of which is related to the individual meanings of the composing morphemes. This duality of patterning is not a necessity for lexicons and the question remains wide open regarding how a population of individuals is able to bootstrap such a structure and the evolutionary advantages of its emergence. Here we address this question in the framework of a multi-agents model, where a population of individuals plays simple naming games in a conceptual environment modeled as a graph. We demonstrate that errors in communication as well as a blending repair strategy, which crucially exploits a shared conceptual representation of the environment, are sufficient conditions for the emergence of duality of patterning, that can thus be explained in a pure cultural way. Compositional lexicons turn out to be faster to lead to successful communication than purely combinatorial lexicons, suggesting that meaning played a crucial role in the evolution of language.

When people perform a task as part of a joint action, their behavior is not the same as it would be if they were performing the same task alone, since it has to be adapted to facilitate shared understanding (or sometimes to prevent it). Joint performance of music offers a test bed for ecologically valid investigations of the way non-verbal behavior facilitates joint action. Here we compare the expressive movement of violinists when playing in solo and ensemble conditions. The first violinists of two string quartets (SQs), professional and student, were asked to play the same musical fragments in a solo condition and with the quartet. Synchronized multimodal recordings were created from the performances, using a specially developed software platform. Different patterns of head movement were observed. By quantifying them using an appropriate measure of entropy, we showed that head movements are more predictable in the quartet scenario. Rater evaluations showed that the change does not, as might be assumed, entail markedly reduced expression. They showed some ability to discriminate between solo and ensemble performances, but did not distinguish them in terms of emotional content or expressiveness. The data raise provocative questions about joint action in realistically complex scenarios.

We investigate the accuracy of how author names are reported in bibliographic records excerpted from four prominent sources: WoS, Scopus, PubMed, and CrossRef. We take as a case study 44,549 publications stored in the internal database of Sapienza University of Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe. While our results indicate generally good accuracy for all bibliographic data sources considered, we highlight a number of issues that undermine the accuracy for certain classes of author names, including compound names and names with diacritics, which are common features to Italian and other Western languages.

One of the main challenges of embodied theories is accounting for meanings of abstract words. The most common explanation is that abstract words, like concrete ones, are grounded in perception and action systems. According to other explanations, abstract words, differently from concrete ones, would activate situations and introspection; alternatively, they would be represented through metaphoric mapping. However, evidence provided so far pertains to specific domains. To be able to account for abstract words in their variety we argue it is necessary to take into account not only the fact that language is grounded in the sensorimotor system, but also that language represents a linguistic-social experience. To study abstractness as a continuum we combined a concrete (C) verb with both a concrete and an abstract (A) noun; and an abstract verb with the same nouns previously used (grasp vs. describe a flower vs. a concept). To disambiguate between the semantic meaning and the grammatical class of the words, we focused on two syntactically different languages: German and Italian. Compatible combinations (CC, AA) were processed faster than mixed ones (CA, AC). This is in line with the idea that abstract and concrete words are processed preferentially in parallel systems - abstract in the language system and concrete more in the motor system, thus costs of processing within one system are the lowest. This parallel processing takes place most probably within different anatomically predefined routes. With mixed combinations, when the concrete word preceded the abstract one (CA), participants were faster, regardless of the grammatical class and the spoken language. This is probably due to the peculiar mode of acquisition of abstract words, as they are acquired more linguistically than perceptually. Results confirm embodied theories which assign a crucial role to both perception-action and linguistic experience for abstract words.

AbstractScientific writings, as one essential part of human culture, have evolved over centuries into their current form. Knowing how scientific writings evolved is particularly helpful in understanding how trends in scientific culture developed. It also allows us to better understand how scientific culture was interwoven with human culture generally. The availability of massive digitized texts and the progress in computational technologies today provide us with a convenient and credible way to discern the evolutionary patterns in scientific writings by examining the diachronic linguistic changes. The linguistic changes in scientific writings reflect the genre shifts that took place with historical changes in science and scientific writings. This study investigates a general evolutionary linguistic pattern in scientific writings. It does so by merging two credible computational methods: relative entropy; word-embedding concreteness and imageability. It thus creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (PTRS, 1665–1869). The data from two computational approaches can be well mapped to support the argument that this journal followed the evolutionary trend of increasing professionalization and specialization. But it also shows that language use in this journal was greatly influenced by historical events and other socio-cultural factors. This study, as a “culturomic” approach, demonstrates that the linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre. The approaches proposed by this study can make a great contribution to full-text analysis in scientometrics.

This paper uses linked apprenticeship-family reconstitution records to explore the influence of family structure on human capital formation in preindustrial England. We observe a small but significant relationship between birth order, resources and human capital investments. Among the gentry, eldest sons were almost never apprenticed. Outside the gentry, a large number of apprentices were eldest sons, even from farming families. This Implies a relatively large place for a child’s aptitude and interest in shaping their career compared to custom or inheritance practices, making the “middling sorts” behave much more as families do in presentday labour studies than the contemporary elites. We also find a surprisingly high rate of return migration, questioning the emphasis on neo-locality and suggesting that parents could anticipate benefiting directly from positive externalities arising from the training provided to children. This interpretation also fits well with our finding that if parents had died before indenture, apprentices were significantly less likely to return home.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

A turning point in European administrative and documentary practices was traditionally associated, most famously by Robert-Henri Bautier, with the monarchies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By summarizing previous research in this field, as well as by using both published and unpublished sources, this article intends to underline an earlier process of transition connected to the development of significant new techniques for the production and preservation of documents in Renaissance Italian city-states. Focusing on the important case of Florence, the administrative uses of records connected to government, diplomacy and military needs will be discussed, and evidence will be provided that such documentary practices accelerated significantly during the so-called Italian Wars (from 1494 onwards). A particular reason of interest for Florence at this time is that a major role in the production and storage of a large quantity of state papers was played by Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the outstanding political thinkers of the age. This was especially true in connection to the new militia which he himself created in 1506. By stressing the role of information management and the importance of correspondence networks at a time of war and crisis, this article also contributes to recent scholarship which has focused on the growth of public records relating to diplomacy in Italy during the second half of the fifteenth century, as well as to a recent field of historiography which has lately gained importance: namely the ‘documentary history of institutions’.

We use duration models on a well-known historical data set of more than 15,000 families and 60,000 births in England for the period 1540–1850 to show that the sampled families adjusted the timing of their births in accordance with the economic conditions as well as their stock of dependent children. The effects were larger among the lower socioeconomic ranks. Our findings on the existence of parity-dependent as well as parity-independent birth spacing in England are consistent with the growing evidence that marital birth control was present in pre-transitional populations. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13524-017-0556-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

AbstractMany believe that the quality of a scientific publication is as good as the science it cites. However, quantifications of how features of reference lists affect citations remain sparse. We examined seven numerical characteristics of reference lists of 50,878 research articles published in 17 ecological journals between 1997 and 2017. Over this period, significant changes occurred in reference lists’ features. On average, more recent papers have longer reference lists and cite more high Impact Factor papers and fewer non-journal publications. We also show that highly cited articles across the ecological literature have longer reference lists, cite more recent and impactful references, and include more self-citations. Conversely, the proportion of ‘classic’ papers and non-journal publications cited, as well as the temporal span of the reference list, have no significant influence on articles’ citations. From this analysis, we distill a recipe for crafting impactful reference lists, at least in ecology.