The input for early language learning is often viewed as a landscape of ambiguity with the occasional high-quality naming event providing resources to resolve uncertainty. Word learning from ambiguous naming events is often studied using screen-based cross-situational learning tasks. Little is known, however, on how ambiguity impacts real-time word learning in free-flowing interactions. To explore this question, we asked parent-infant dyads to play in a home-like environment with unfamiliar objects while wearing head-mounted eye trackers. After the play session, we tested whether infants learned any of the object-label mappings and categorized individual words as learned or not learned. Dyadic behaviors and the visual information available to infants during the naming moments of learned and not learned words were analyzed. The results show that infants’ embodied attention during ambiguous naming moments was the key to predicting learning outcomes. Specifically, infants held and looked at the target object longer in ambiguous instances that led to learning. Our results emphasize the importance of studying word learning in naturalistic environments to better understand the cues infants use to resolve ambiguity in everyday learning contexts.

Embodied attention resolves visual ambiguity to support infants’ real-time word learning

The existing literature on incidental word learning has not studied the time course of this process in adolescents, even though this type of learning is the first source of acquisition of new words, particularly in secondary education. The present study fills this gap, and also examines the role of preexisting vocabulary in this process, and the relationship between the percentage of words learned and reading times. A sample of fourteen adolescents completed self-paced reading study with three-phase (exposure, implicit assessment, explicit assessment) plus a vocabulary test. The results show that those participants who learned more words spent more reading time on the new words in the exposure phase, and furthermore, evidenced a facilitation effect after only four exposures. Tentatively, this ability could be related in part to the adolescents’ pre-existing vocabulary.

Understanding the Time Course of Context-Based Incidental Word Learning

Decades of research has demonstrated that people do not make economically rational decisions when risk is involved. While research has focused on how and why people’s decisions differ from economic rationality, an unanswered question is whether people can learn to improve their risky decision making in response to feedback on similar past decisions. In an experiment, we test whether people’s risk preferences change after they received either natural (a single outcome), or idealised (the average outcome) feedback about similar decisions in the past. Crucially, unlike studies of decisions from experience, they received feedback on several different decisions from description, rather than repeated feedback about a single choice. Compared to a control, who received no feedback, both forms of feedback led to an increase in choice of the higher Expected Value gamble. Modelling suggests, for natural feedback, this may be due to changes in how they treat probability information.

Effects of learning and feedback on risk preferences

While this year's AAA theme asks us to secure a more "capacious, progressive vision of the human," this panel looks at a particularly contested and often ignored site of human interaction and representation: pornography. Studying pornography anthropologically exposes particular understandings of personhood-notions of the representable semiotically loaded with moral and ethical assumptions-as well as forces existing frameworks for the interpretation of images into the light. Moral orientations to porn - among its producers, consumers, and those who identify as neither but nevertheless interact with the conceptual category- bring into relief morally charged ambivalences about the agency of images. These can manifest as uncertainties about an image's potentiality as merely a text, the "promise of flesh," or an experience of the flesh itself (Rancière 2007) or judgements regarding an image's "tendency" (Mazzarella 2013), its performative potential to stir immoral impulses in viewers. In other contexts, illicit images are understood to presence occult spiritual forces (Meyer 2015) or otherwise alter proximity to religious or divine figures, transforming ethical and spiritual practices (Buggenhagen 2010, Sansi 2013, Van der Port 2005). Alternately, the obscene can produce embodied reactions to moral transgression that force those moral transgressions into public debate (Allison 2000, Larkin 2008). This panel builds on these efforts to situate illicit images within broader contexts of image-making and moral aspiration. While some scholars in the social sciences have attempted to provide historical context for shifting notions of morality as it pertains to pornography (Rubin 1984; Lancaster 2011), others have seen academia as beholden to particular ethical stances on porn, as most famously represented by the feminist "sex wars" of the late-twentieth century (Duggan and Hunter 2006). Ethnographic work that focuses on the experiences of porn performers (Miller-Young 2014) has contextualized notions of the moral within the "political economy of pleasure" of the transnational sex trade; a perspective reiterated in work focused on sex workers more broadly (Kimberly Kay Hoang 2016; Maia 2016; Frank 2013; Bernstein 2018). While the 'moral,' and even the "pornographic" are highly contested categories, this panel offers these terms not to be defined or secured, but as keywords for an exploration of the relationship between formulations of moral selfhood and various illicit image practices. What sorts of interpretive frameworks for truth, digital embodiment, and moral selfhood emerge through individuals' or groups' orientations to pornography? Through what semiotic processes do these interpretive frameworks become naturalized? For instance, how are notions of personhood (e.g. the porn star, the contaminable viewer, etc.) constructed and reinforced by particular classes of images ("pornographic" or "obscene" images), themselves defined by divergent and highly contextual frames of interpretation (e.g. religious doctrine; legal discourse, social reform movements, extralegal media censorship regimes)? To what extent are these interpretive frameworks open to contestation or critical reappropriation? This panel explores the topic of pornography as a site for exploring how frameworks for the interpretation of images co-constitute moral discourses, including ideas of an "ethical self"; notions of the representable, the transgressive and the real.

Wearing Illicit Images: Fabrics of Pornography and Citizenship in Senegal

Edward Said’s summation that “we live in a period of migration, of forced travel and forced residence, that has literally engulfed the globe” (Culture and Resistance 2003) is particularly apt with this panel. Some of the world’s highest levels of urbanization and socioeconomic inequalities are in the Middle East, which is also now a premier displacement region due to bilateral containment policies of externalization and national policies of refusing refugees from the region by European and North American governments. Displaced persons of all types and categories in this region typically prefer to settle in cities and towns. For refugees, this includes bypassing or leaving formal camps, thus further blurring the categories of “migrant,” “refugee,” "resident," "citizen," and • in the Middle East • temporary visitor or “guest.” On-going research on urban displaced in the region shows that settlement patterns are influenced by previous knowledge, kinship, social networks, religion/denomination preferences, and security considerations, as well as imaginaries of possibility and potential. Typically, Middle Eastern settlement processes are iterative, with multiple resettlements, which may render any individual visible or invisible, “guest” or “resident”, which is often based on political expediency. While cities offer economic opportunities, education, and access to other necessary municipal services, displacement crises often become protracted, thus defining the (im)possibilities for onward migration or voluntary repatriation. Long-term residence of displaced persons can strain local infrastructure, service provision, and social relations with host communities. What are the impacts of these demographic, economic, and socio- cultural changes posed by the urbanization movements of displaced persons on different forms and levels of governance? And what are the impacts of such shifts on the displaced persons' subjectivities? The papers in this panel address these questions through ethnographic research with displaced Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, and Syrians in major urban areas of five Middle Eastern countries • Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Sudan, and Afghanistan. The papers each take on major theoretical and empirical questions of visibility, mobility, labor and livelihoods, kinship and social networks, the governing bodies of civil society and (I)NGOs as well as bureaucratic policies that define the contours of possibility, and their impacts on subjectivities. While over the past decade academic research on displacement in the Middle East has often focused on refugee camps, the historiography of forced displacement and relief, and country specific studies of Middle East refugee crises, rarely have they had a specific urban focus or lens. This panel seeks to expand this scholarship and engage some of the most pressing questions of anthropology of migration in the urban Middle East.

Syrians in Lebanon and Mobilities in Crisis

Underline digital video library

Embodied attention resolves visual ambiguity to support infants’ real-time word learning

Understanding the Time Course of Context-Based Incidental Word Learning

Effects of learning and feedback on risk preferences

Wearing Illicit Images: Fabrics of Pornography and Citizenship in Senegal

Syrians in Lebanon and Mobilities in Crisis

Urban Displaced in the Middle East: New Movements, New Governance, and New Subjectivities

The Illicit Image: Pornography, Image-Making, and Moral Aspiration

The Shipping Nudes: The Contested Ethics of Fanart

Capitalizing Through Separation: The Adult Industry's Sexual Innovation During COVID-19

Debating white supremacist tattoos in gay pornography

Pornography, Censorship and Moral Aspirations in Communism

"Present Absentees": Statelessness, Personhood, and Mixed-Nationality Kinship in Jordan

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