The visual arts have played an increasingly important role in examining and critiquing past and present human activities in Antarctica as governed by the Antarctic Treaty and its Protocol on Environmental protection. This paper analyses the work of six artists who have contributed to this scrutiny, awakening us to fabrications and helping to enrich Antarctic cultures beyond the scientific and the environmental. It encourages all signatory nations to the Antarctic Treaty System to embrace and empower a more diverse artistic engagement with Antarctica and suggests that artists find new ways to address threats to the Antarctic, whether they come from within and from without.

During the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, some communities reacted hostilely to the implementation of quarantine measures. This study's aim was to examine the views of lay people in Guinea on the acceptability of community quarantine. From June to August 2016, 302 adults indicated the acceptability of quarantine in 36 scenarios varying as a function of four factors: the infectious disease's level of contagiousness, its level of lethality, the number of cases in the community and whether persons in quarantine are provided with support services. Five clusters were identified: (1) for 18% of the participants, quarantine is never acceptable; (2) 16% considered, in contrast, that quarantine is always acceptable; (3) for 14%, it depends on the disease's level of contagiousness and lethality; (4) 36% based their judgement not only on the levels of contagiousness and lethality, but also on whether those in quarantine are provided with support services; and (5) 16% had no opinion. Interventions to increase voluntary compliance with community quarantine in Guinea must not be ‘one size fits all’, but must be multifaceted and tailored in design and implementation to match the diversity of people's concerns and needs.

Objectives: To evaluate the attitudes and perceptions of psychiatrists and psychiatry residents regarding neurosurgical procedures for treating psychiatric disorders and to identify potential barriers to patient referral. Methods: A survey consisting of 25 questions was created using SurveyMonkey and was distributed to psychiatrists and psychiatry residents in Quebec. The study was approved by the McGill University Health Center’s Research Ethics Board. Descriptive statistics and Friedman’s test were performed using SPSS software. Results: A total of 99 participants, including 64 residents and 35 psychiatrists, completed more than 75% of the survey and were included in data analysis. Overall, participants were significantly (p < 0.0005) more comfortable in referring patients suffering from treatment-resistant obsessive–compulsive disorder than from treatment-resistant major depressive disorder and preferred to refer patients for deep brain stimulation (DBS) rather than for anterior cingulotomy/capsulotomy (AC). Only 11.43% of psychiatrists had ever referred a patient for AC or DBS, and 34.69% of respondents felt that these procedures were dangerous. Lack of knowledge (82.83%) was viewed as the principal limiting factor, and 57.58% of respondents identified ≥6 different barriers to patient referral. The majority of participants (69.39%) were interested in improving their knowledge on psychiatric neurosurgery, and 82.65% felt that this subject should be included in the psychiatry residency curriculum. Conclusion: Overall, participants acknowledged having many limitations to referring patients for neurosurgical interventions. While informative conferences discussing neuromodulation/neuroablation could easily address many barriers, further studies are required to assess how these could change attitudes and patterns of referral.

We assessed local knowledge of and attitudes towards a large, endemic bovid, the Bhutan takin Budorcas whitei, within its seasonal range in Jigme Dorji National Park, Bhutan. Using semi-structured questionnaires, data were collected in March 2015 from interviews with 169 park residents. A conditional inference tree analysis was used to explore associations between demography, locality, and secondary response variables through questions relating to respondents’ knowledge of the takin's status as a protected species, a Vulnerable species, and as the national animal. Most respondents knew the takin was Bhutan's national animal, and of those, a significantly high proportion also knew of its protected status. Significantly more respondents residing in the species’ summer, rather than winter, range were aware of the takin's Vulnerable status. Most respondents expressed positive feelings towards the takin and supported its protection. This strong positive attitude, in conjunction with awareness-raising efforts, could be valuable for promoting the takin as a montane flagship species.

“Neural coding” is a popular metaphor in neuroscience, where objective properties of the world are communicated to the brain in the form of spikes. Here I argue that this metaphor is often inappropriate and misleading. First, when neurons are said to encode experimental parameters, the neural code depends on experimental details that are not carried by the coding variable (e.g. the spike count). Thus, the representational power of neural codes is much more limited than generally implied. Second, neural codes carry information only by reference to things with known meaning. In contrast, perceptual systems must build information from relations between sensory signals and actions, forming an internal model. Neural codes are inadequate for this purpose because they are unstructured and therefore unable to represent relations. Third, coding variables are observables tied to the temporality of experiments, while spikes are timed actions that mediate coupling in a distributed dynamical system. The coding metaphor tries to fit the dynamic, circular and distributed causal structure of the brain into a linear chain of transformations between observables, but the two causal structures are incongruent. I conclude that the neural coding metaphor cannot provide a valid basis for theories of brain function, because it is incompatible with both the causal structure of the brain and the representational requirements of cognition.

This paper seeks to answer the question of what psychological preconditions must exist for institutions to determine behaviour and order our societies. We defend the notion that institutional theory may gain from such a contribution. We introduce a new theory of the mind as a network structure within which the psychological process operates to integrate insights from cognitive and affective psychology into institutional theory. We discover that institutions must be expressed as rules in mental networks which guide thinking and behaviour, be embedded within a cognitive apparatus such that they are called to mind by perception to so guide thinking and behaviour and be anchored to emotion such that they are endowed with urgency in order for them to have a hold on individual behaviour. From this theory we derive definite predictions, as well as policy insights.

Buruli ulcer (BU) belongs to the group of neglected tropical diseases and constitutes a public health problem in many rural communities in Côte d’Ivoire. The transmission patterns of this skin infection are poorly defined, hence the current study aimed to contribute to the understanding, perceptions and interpretations of its mode of transmission using a socio-environmental approach. Social and environmental risk factors that may expose people to infection, and the dynamics of local transfer of knowledge and practices related to BU, were assessed in two endemic locations in southern Côte d’Ivoire, i.e. Taabo and Daloa. Data were generated by the administration of a household questionnaire (N=500) between February and June 2012 to assess how the population perceived transmission of BU, focus group discussions with local communities (N=8) to analyse ideologies regarding transmission patterns and semi-structured interviews with patients or their parents, former BU patients and traditional healers (N=30). The interviewees’ empirical knowledge of the disease was found to be close to its biomedical description. Their aetiological perception of the disease was linked to natural (e.g. dirty water, insects) and supernatural (e.g. witchcraft, fate) causes. Some informants attributed the spread of the disease to recently immigrated neighbouring communities whose arrival coincided with an increase in reported BU cases. However, the general consensus seemed to be that the main mode of transmission was contact with infested soil or ulcerated wounds. The participants were aware that BU was a socio-environmental problem in these endemic areas, offering a good starting point for educational campaigns for at-risk communities. Buruli ulcer control programmes should therefore include educational campaigns and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) interventions for those at risk in affected communities.

A woman’s decision to continue or terminate an unplanned pregnancy is affected by a broad range of contextual and cognitive factors. The identification of women’s perceptions of unplanned pregnancy is crucial for health care providers to be able to offer supportive care and counselling. The aim of this study was to develop an instrument to accurately measure women’s perceptions of unplanned pregnancy: the Women’s Perceptions of Unplanned Pregnancy Questionnaire. The instrument was developed using a methodological framework guided by Waltz et al. (2010). A conceptual model of the designed instrument emerged from the qualitative study using a content analysis approach conducted in Tabriz, Iran. Participants were recruited using convenience sampling method between June 2016 and July 2017. Participants were a sample of married Iranian women between the ages of 15 and 49 who had experienced an unplanned pregnancy, either unwanted or mistimed, within the last 3 months. Women with an established diagnosis of a psychological disorder were excluded from the study. The psychometric properties of the instrument were assessed using face, content, concurrent and construct validations. To evaluate face validity, qualitative and quantitative (item impact score) methods were used. The content validity was assessed by fifteen panel experts. In addition, concurrent validity of the designed instrument was tested using the Persian version of the Cambridge Worry Scale and the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The construct validity was calculated by using the exploratory factor analysis method. Data were collected from questionnaires completed by 310 eligible women. Analysis of the data using exploratory factor analysis yielded 31 items in a unique six-factor structure. The instrument was found to have high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α=0.88) and adequate reliability (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient=0.89). A clearer understanding of women’s perceptions of unplanned pregnancy may enhance reproductive services and interventions.

Ecosystem services related to biodiversity, including cultural services, are essential for agricultural production such as viticulture. In agricultural landscapes, pesticides and mechanization threaten biodiversity, lead to landscape simplification and may reduce ecosystem services. On the other hand, consumers are more and more aware of environmental issues in food production. We investigated if landscape complexity, including soil management practices, was (i) appreciated by visitors and (ii) presented by winegrowers and tourism professionals in the French vineyards with the designation of geographical origin (DGO) ‘Coteaux du Layon’. Our goal was to determine if landscape complexity provides cultural ecosystem services such as aesthetics beneficial for the wine trade and the DGO region's attractiveness. We analyzed the iconographic content and the composition of landscape photographs on 50 websites to investigate if local winegrowers and tourism professionals associate biodiversity in the landscape and soil management practices with wine promotion. A questionnaire was realized to study the perception of local landscapes by interviewing 192 visitors of the region. The benefits of landscape complexity and soil management practices favoring biodiversity in viticulture were known and appreciated by many visitors, even if photographs of wine and traditional practices appeared to encourage wine purchasing. Local winegrowers’ representation of the DGO region only partially served these preferences; instead they mainly presented the wine-growing region by photographs focusing on wine bottles and vineyards. Consumer's preferences showed that complex landscapes could provide cultural ecosystem services that winegrowers are still less aware of. Therefore, complexity-targeted landscape planning including vegetation cover in soil management should be included in policy recommendations as agroecological measures for sustainable DGO production.

In spite of significant investment, community-based conservation often suffers from a lack of appropriate design. In this study, drawing on 86 interviews around six national parks in tropical Africa, we analyse the perceptions of different stakeholders (e.g. governmental officials, non-governmental organization staff and researchers) regarding community participation. Our results mainly reveal the absence of a clear and shared definition of community participation. While 67% of the participants defined community participation as a community's support of nature protection (low empowerment) and/or as its participation in conservation implementation (medium empowerment), 28% mentioned that the community should also participate in decision-making (high empowerment). Our study shows that participants with no university degree, belonging to governmental organizations and/or employed as workers tend to propose a lower level of empowerment, while those educated to a postgraduate level, belonging to research institutes and/or employed as researchers propose higher degrees of empowerment. Our study mainly suggests that the different degrees of empowerment proposed by the stakeholders depend on their relation to the space of conservation and their daily connection to practical management as drivers of the inclusion or exclusion of local communities in conservation decision-making. To properly design and implement community-based conservation, conservation actors above all must share a common definition of the concept.

Objectives: Patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) demonstrate deficits in cross-cortical feature binding distinct from age-related changes in selective attention. This may have consequences for driving performance given its demands on multisensory integration. We examined the relationship of visuospatial search and binding to driving in patients with early AD and elderly controls (EC). Methods: Participants (42 AD; 37 EC) completed search tasks requiring either luminance-motion (L-M) or color-motion (C-M) binding, analogs of within and across visual processing stream binding, respectively. Standardized road test (RIRT) and naturalistic driving data (CDAS) were collected alongside clinical screening measures. Results: Patients performed worse than controls on most cognitive and driving indices. Visual search and clinical measures were differentially related to driving behavior across groups. L-M search and Trail Making Test (TMT-B) were associated with RIRT performance in controls, while C-M binding, TMT-B errors, and Clock Drawing correlated with CDAS performance in patients. After controlling for demographic and clinical predictors, L-M reaction time significantly predicted RIRT performance in controls. In patients, C-M binding made significant contributions to CDAS above and beyond demographic and clinical predictors. RIRT and C-M binding measures accounted for 51% of variance in CDAS performance in patients. Conclusions: Whereas selective attention is associated with driving behavior in EC, cross-cortical binding appears most sensitive to driving in AD. This latter relationship may emerge only in naturalistic settings, which better reflect patients’ driving behavior. Visual integration may offer distinct insights into driving behavior, and thus has important implications for assessing driving competency in early AD. (JINS, 2018, 24, 486–497)