This chapter aims to present mental representations by seven audiovisual specialists on Sirena, the antagonist of a noir fictional story in a multilinear interactive short film script. To this end, a reception study was created with in-depth interviews with specialists after reading the script to discuss its several aspects. This approach is of qualitative character. The study was conducted bet...

We propose that the unique ability of humans to have separate mental representations for each finger and to move them in different sequential orders were redeployed for arithmetic. We tested our hypothesis with a behavioral dual-task experiment, where subjects (N=46) solved addition problems (primary task) and performed a sentence comprehension task (control task), while concurrently tapping th...

Two types of truth table task are used to examine people’s mental representation of conditionals: possibilities tasks and truth tasks. Despite their high degree of resemblance, the two task types not only differ regarding their number of answer alternatives, but also regarding their directionality: The truth task concerns the evaluation of the given rule on the basis of situations, while the po...

Vigorous debate in phonetics and phonology has focused on the structure and cognitive foundation of distinctive feature theory, as well as on the definition and representation of features themselves. In particular, we show in Section 1 that, although vowel height has long been the object of close scrutiny, research on the threeor moretiered height representation of vowels in the phonology of En...

Qualitative probabilistic networks were designed to overcome, to at least some extent, the quantification problem known to probabilistic networks. Qualitative networks abstract from the numerical probabilities of their quantitative counterparts by using signs to summarise the probabilistic influences between their variables. One of the major drawbacks of these qualitative abstractions, however,...

In three experiments we tested whether nostalgia bolsters meaning in life relative to two other modes of autobiographical thought: imagining a desired future experience and recalling a positive past experience. In Experiment 1 participants thought about a nostalgic or desired future experience and then completed a presence of meaning scale. Thinking about a nostalgic (compared to desired future...

The scientific study of music blossomed in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany and Austria. Researchers such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Carl Stumpf investigated the physiological and psychological bases of music but did not focus on higher-level musical topics. It was not until the early twentieth century that scientific methods were applied to the study of larg...

Qualitative probabilistic networks have been designed for probabilistic reasoning in a qualitative way. Due to their coarse level of representation detail, qualitative probabilistic networks do not provide for resolving trade-offs and typically yield ambiguous results upon inference. We present an algorithm for computing more insightful results for unresolved trade-offs. The algorithm builds up...

An agent operating in an unpredictable world must be prepared to adapt its plans to the circumstances that it actually encounters. To do this, it must recognise when unpredicted situations aaect its goals. In general, because of the complexity of both the world and the agent's plans, it is infeasible to consider every element of every situation that the agent encounters in the context of each o...

In three experiments we explored the mental representation of morphologically complex words in French. Subjects were asked to perform a gender decision task on morphologically complex words that were of the same gender as their base or not. We found that gender decisions were made more slowly for morphologically complex words made from a base with an opposite gender compared to words for which ...