Open Research Repository
The Open Research Repository (ORR) is the official institutional repository of the Central European University. The repository provides access to the research output of the CEU community by collecting open access versions of scholarly works authored or co-authored by CEU faculty and students.
For more information, please contact us at: scholcom@ceu.edu
Recent Submissions
Item Partial perversity and perverse partiality in postsocialist Hungary(Taylor and Francis, 2018-01-01)This chapter places two different conceptual fields into productive friction, joining Marilyn Strathern's anthropological thinking on the relationality of "dividual" personhood to José Esteban Muñoz's theorizing of the complex ambivalences of queer "disidentification" to explore the discomforts of two consequential hinges of postsocialist Hungarian sexual politics: the sexual tensions of late socialist dissidence, and queer activist debates about national/transnational (dis)identification. This conceptual fusion, I argue, pushes us to reimagine not only the partialities and perversities of postsocialist sexual politics, but the borders of queer and anthropological theories, thus potentially rendering anthropology more queer and queer theory more anthropological.Item Twelfth-Century Scholars on the Moral Exemplarity of Ancient Poetry(2023)Several twelfth-century scholars make exemplarity a central element of ancient poetry’s moral value for contemporary readers, especially Eustathius’ comments on Homer as a vehicle for ethical reflection and moral education.Item Ten-month-olds infer relative costs of different goal-directed actions(2020)While it is straightforward to compare the costs of different variants of the same action (e.g., walking to a coffeeshop at the end of the block will always be less costly than walking to a coffeeshop three blocks away), the relative costs of different actions are not directly comparable (e.g., would it be easier to jump over or walk around a fence?). Across two experiments we demonstrate that 10-month-old infants spontaneously encode the manner of different goal-directed actions (jumping over an obstacle vs. detouring around it, Experiment 1) and use the principle of cost-efficiency to infer their relative costs (jumping is less costly to bypass low walls, but detouring is less costly to bypass high walls, Experiment 2). By relating action choices to the physical parameters of the environment, infants identify the least costly actions given the circumstances, which allows them to make behavioral predictions in new environments and may also enable them to infer others' motor competence.Item Witnessing, Remembering, and Testifying : Why the Past Is Special for Human Beings(2020-03-01)The past is undeniably special for human beings. To a large extent, both individuals and collectives define themselves through history. Moreover, humans seem to have a special way of cognitively representing the past: episodic memory. As opposed to other ways of representing knowledge, remembering the past in episodic memory brings with it the ability to become a witness. Episodic memory allows us to determine what of our knowledge about the past comes from our own experience and thereby what parts of the past we can give testimony about. In this article, we aim to give an account of the special status of the past by asking why humans have developed the ability to give testimony about it. We argue that the past is special for human beings because it is regularly, and often principally, the only thing that can determine present social realities such as commitments, entitlements, and obligations. Because the social effects of the past often do not leave physical traces behind, remembering the past and the ability to bear testimony it brings is necessary for coordinating social realities with other individuals.Item Retrospective attribution of false beliefs in 3-year-old children(2018-11-06)A current debate in psychology and cognitive science concerns the nature of young children's ability to attribute and track others' beliefs. Beliefs can be attributed in at least two different ways: prospectively, during the observation of belief-inducing situations, and in a retrospective manner, based on episodic retrieval of the details of the events that brought about the beliefs. We developed a task in which only retrospective attribution, but not prospective belief tracking, would allow children to correctly infer that someone had a false belief. Eighteen- and 36-month-old children observed a displacement event, which was witnessed by a person wearing sunglasses (Experiment 1). Having later discovered that the sunglasses were opaque, 36-month-olds correctly inferred that the person must have formed a false belief about the location of the objects and used this inference in resolving her referential expressions. They successfully performed retrospective revision in the opposite direction as well, correcting a mistakenly attributed false belief when this was necessary (Experiment 3). Thus, children can compute beliefs retrospectively, based on episodic memories, well before they pass explicit false-belief tasks. Eighteen-month-olds failed in such a task, suggesting that they cannot retrospectively attribute beliefs or revise their initial belief attributions. However, an additional experiment provided evidence for prospective tracking of false beliefs in 18-month-olds (Experiment 2). Beyond identifying two different modes for tracking and updating others' mental states early in development, these results also provide clear evidence of episodic memory retrieval in young children.
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