Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier

After the Dampier voyages and a lull in Admiralty initiatives, further and more concerted British exploration of the Pacific, was to gain momentum in the mid-eighteenth century. Tom Ryan suggests that “European understanding” of the South Seas was profoundly reworked after the publication in 1756 of a French collection of travel accounts, namely Charles de Brosses’s Histoire des navigations aux terres australes. Histoire, which was a two-volume compilation of accounts of travel to the south seas spanning a period of 250 years “contenant ce que l’on sait des moeurs & des production des contrées découvertes jusqu’à ce jour.” De Brosses, like his English counterparts since Hakluyt, was also interested in examining “l’utilité d’y faire de plus amples découvertes, & des moyens d’y former un établissement.” The only translation into English of de Brosses’s two-volume founding document was John Callander’s later Terra Australis Cognita published in 1766–1768, which appropriated the work of Charles de Brosses and turned propaganda for French exploration of the Southern Ocean into propaganda for British initiatives “to promote the Commercial Interests of Great Britain, and extend her Naval Power.” Contemporaneously, others, like Alexander Dalrymple, were also actively interested in further exploration of the Pacific. Dalrymple had documented and recognized links with navigation and exploration and his 144-page Account of the Discoveries made in the South Pacifick Ocean which two years later became An historical collection of the several voyages and discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean. By Alexander Dalrymple, Esq. Dalrymple was no amateur armchair traveller, like Callander, and he showed honed interest in the search for the southern continent. His status, as recognized geographer and navigator, gave credit to his theory which was based on sightings of land by seafarers over the centuries. He argued that there was an extensive landmass awaiting discovery in the Pacific and that “we have traces from antient times, warranted by latter experience, of rich and valuable countries in it; no subject can be more interesting, to a commercial state, than the discovery of new countries and people, to invigorate the hand of industry, by opening new vents for manufactures.” These types of texts, along with others, appeared in print prior to and during Britain’s ground-breaking exploratory forays into the South Pacific.

The Cook voyages covered a span of only 12 years, between 1768 and 1780 but they brought cartographical precision and clarity to European thinking about the south and north Pacific Ocean, which the Wallis voyage had not. The first two voyages laid to rest the centuries-old myth of an undiscovered continent in the high southern latitudes (Terra Australis Incognita). The third voyage was an exploration of the north Pacific in search of Northern passage by sea from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Though Cook did not discover the Northwest Passage, his voyage was to initiate long-term British and European commercial and colonial interest in the area. Cook’s expeditions may be understood not only as voyages of discovery, but also of scientific enquiry and artistic endeavour, with George III showing interest in Enlightenment epistemological advances, as well as in pursuing colonial projects. Both meant filling in cartographical gaps with, as the Admiralty instructions to Cook stipulate, the hope of bringing honour, glory and commercial gain to Britain as a result. Obviously, from the view of the Pacific peoples whom James Cook encountered, as Michael Pearson argues “the idea of ‘discovery’ is meaningless […] if the term ‘discovery’ is used at all, it is in the context of the discovery of geographical or scientific facts for European science and commerce, not in the sense of the discovery of previously unknown land (though ‘discovery’ is appropriate for Antarctica…).” These overlapping objectives were broader in scope as compared to Wallis’s remit and would perhaps allow accrued compacting of the violence that occurred, as described with relation to Dampier’s circumnavigation in the Roebuck where geographical, nautical and natural historical particulars perform an attenuant and camouflage function, less apparent in the source Wallis texts.

John Beaglehole in his introduction to this first voyage of James Cook (1768–1771) calls it an “old story.” He is here referring to the voyages of exploration and prospection undertaken by nations of the Northern Hemisphere to discover what was on the other side of the globe, beyond the Asian, African and European land masses which were known to the ancient geographers. For Claudius Ptomely, for example, the second-century Egyptian astronomer, the known lands veered to the east, and joined the southern part of Africa. Thus, there was no Pacific Ocean as we know it today, but a landlocked Indian Ocean—the Magnus Sinus—the Great Gulf. The land to the south of the Tropic of Capricorn was Terra Incognita, unknown land. There was though some speculation about gaps in the land to the east or the south, leading or not, to another ocean or sea. This conjectural geography was to characterize thinking about the shape of the world in the centuries to come, as the southern continental edge was pushed back during the successive ages of exploration. At the end of the fifteenth century, Columbus’s discoveries of the Caribbean Islands and the South American landmass led geographers to suggest a new, augmented vision of the world, representing the Americas as not joined to Asia, with an ocean in between, the Pacific (unnamed), perhaps that mentioned by Marco Polo during his thirteenth-century travels! Nevertheless, cartographical practice in the coming years continued to represent the two (the American continent and Asia) as joined. Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama in 1497 both rounded the Cape of Good Hope, allowing for sea space between the tip of Africa and the purely hypothetical coast of Ptolemy’s southern Terra Incognita to take cartographical form. The Tordesillas Treaty in 1494 had divided the world into two, as Europeans took to the seas with a vengeance from this point in time onwards, expanding Ptolemy’s map further as fresh cartographical perspectives emerged. Balboa in 1513 was the first to sight the Pacific Ocean from the coast of present-day America. He crossed the central American isthmus at Darien, and on viewing the expanse of water on the other side, he called it the South Sea. This cartographical context led to the Magellan voyage, the Portuguese navigator convincing Spain that there must be a western route to the east. His revolutionizing five-ship expedition of 1519 ventured into the unknown South-Atlantic waters and Magellan threaded his way through dangerous straits, today the Magellan Straits, and emerged into the relative calm of the ocean, Mar Pacifico, more vast than the mind of man could conceive. Crossing the ocean, encountering death and facing deprivation and disease, Magellan was killed in the present-day Philippines, but one of his ships struggled home, reaching Seville in 1522. The account of the voyage was published by Antonio Pigafetta and came to be identified as Magellan’s. An ocean existed, Asia and the Americas were distinct geographical entities, the South Sea, unimaginably vast, had been crossed, a circumnavigation effected. The southern boundary of the South Sea remained though a mystery despite the rolling back of Ptolemy’s limits with Terra Incognita conceived of as even further south. Magellan was followed by other navigators, and over the decades what Beaglehole calls a highway gradually came to be established across the ocean, to and from Acapulco. Figures like Cortes in Mexico commissioned the early, and disastrous voyages, in search of lands and secure routes. The Galapagos islands were discovered in 1535, the Mare Pacificum started to appear on maps in the 1540s. Sebastian Munster’s Geographia Universalis (1540) contained a map (XXVII) which was one of the first in which the name appeared in print. When taken together with his map of Asia and Europe (map XIX), there appeared for the first time an image of the Pacific Ocean as a continuous whole.

Researchers have shown growing interest in using deep neural networks (DNNs) to efficiently test the effects of perceptual processes on the evolution of color patterns and morphologies. Whether this is a valid approach remains unclear, as it is unknown whether the relative detectability of ecologically relevant stimuli to DNNs actually matches that of biological neural networks. To test this, we compare image classification performance by humans and six DNNs (AlexNet, VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet-18, SqueezeNet, and GoogLeNet) trained to detect artificial moths on tree trunks. Moths varied in their degree of crypsis, conferred by different sizes and spatial configurations of transparent wing elements. Like humans, four of six DNN architectures found moths with larger transparent elements harder to detect. However, humans and only one DNN architecture (GoogLeNet) found moths with transparent elements touching one side of the moth’s outline harder to detect than moths with untouched outlines. When moths were small, the camouflaging effect of transparent elements touching the moth’s outline was reduced for DNNs but enhanced for humans. Prey size can thus interact with camouflage type in opposing directions in humans and DNNs, which warrants a deeper investigation of size interactions with a broader range of stimuli. Overall, our results suggest that humans and DNNs responses had some similarities, but not enough to justify the widespread use of DNNs for studies of camouflage.

Predictive processing is an influential theoretical framework for understanding human and animal cognition. In the context of predictive processing, learning is often reduced to optimizing the parameters of a generative model with a predefined structure. This is known as Bayesian parameter learning . However, to provide a comprehensive account of learning, one must also explain how the brain learns the structure of its generative model. This second kind of learning is known as structure learning . Structure learning would involve true structural changes in generative models. The purpose of the current paper is to describe the processes involved upstream of these structural changes. To do this, we first highlight the remarkable compatibility between predictive processing and the processing fluency theory . More precisely, we argue that predictive processing is able to account for all the main theoretical constructs associated with the notion of processing fluency (i.e., the fluency heuristic, naïve theory, the discrepancy‐attribution hypothesis, absolute fluency, expected fluency, and relative fluency). We then use this predictive processing account of processing fluency to show how the brain could infer whether it needs a structural change for learning the causal regularities at play in the environment. Finally, we speculate on how this inference might indirectly trigger structural changes when necessary.

To achieve sustainable targets, international panels call for a transformative change in human–nature interactions to foster human well‐being and promote pro‐environmental behaviour. The extent to which people considered themselves as part of nature—known as human–nature connectedness—has been shown to be a key societal trait for achieving such a transformative change. Human–nature connectedness is linked to improved human welfare and actions for nature conservation and can be increased by direct contact with natural environments in adults living in the Global North. It has not been shown whether these relations are true across lifetimes and in the Global South, making it difficult to generalise about the effects of human–nature connectedness globally. Here, we conducted a cross‐sectional study to examine and compare human–nature connectedness across ages in 1858 participants aged 3–87 years from two countries: France (N = 1059) and Colombia (N = 799). We also investigated the links between human–nature connectedness, pro‐environmental behaviours, well‐being and two indicators of opportunity to experience nature (i.e. degree of urbanisation and forest cover around the participants' municipality of residence). Results show that human–nature connectedness is positively related to well‐being and pro‐environmental behaviours in both countries. Analyses revealed an age‐related pattern of human–nature connectedness with a significant decline from childhood to the mid‐teens in both countries. Overall, Colombian participants have a higher human–nature connectedness than French participants and individuals' human–nature connectedness was negatively linked to the urbanisation's indices in both countries. Here, we show that human–nature connectedness is linked to sustainable outcomes in a Global South country, just as it is in the Global North. Our study also suggests that increasing contact with nature during formative teenage years could mitigate the observed decline in human–nature connectedness. Future studies are warranted combining qualitative and quantitative measures related to human–nature connectedness, nature experiences, values and practices in relation to nature, in multiple countries from the global South. Our study indicates that enhancing human–nature connectedness could provide an additional tool for achieving sustainable targets globally, not just in highly developed northern‐hemisphere countries. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

This article explores the role of population health intervention research (PHIR) in enhancing health promotion in France, stressing the importance of a more in-depth understanding and thorough analysis of healthcare interventions. Established in 2022, the So-RISP network aims to structure the PHIR field, consolidating expertise from renowned teams specializing in PHIR, primary cancer prevention, and addiction. In January 2023, So-RISP members convened a national workshop. The workshop aimed to share the specificities of PHIR and particularly to clarify the use of theories in PHIR. A qualitative analysis of this workshop was conducted to aid in building a shared and well-defined knowledge base for PHIR stakeholders. Results highlight the necessity of developing a unified terminology and increasing reflexivity among PHIR stakeholders for enhanced effectiveness. The article also identifies key challenges, including the need for interdisciplinary collaboration, facilitating social transformation, and integrating various contexts in intervention analysis.

There are two different ways to seek relevance in the history of education field. One involves closely aligning with contemporary debates to offer a “ready-to-use” historical perspective to education system stakeholders. The other entails diverging from conventional problem frameworks to tackle commonly overlooked or unexplored questions. This requires drawing new perspectives, ideas and knowledge from other research fields.

Since the revolutionary period of the “Arab Spring”, which began in 2011, the question of the Caliphate and its persistence has been the subject of renewed interest, due to new forms of expression of the Caliphate. Implicit in this is the question of its evanescence. When, on 3 March 1924, the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara voted to abolish the caliphate, shockwaves swept through the Muslim world. Our contribution looks at the contextualisation of this decision, which in a way took on a ‘revolutionary’ dimension in a Middle Eastern scene undergoing profound reconfiguration. We will highlight the dynamics at work, and how this decision was part of the genealogy of institutional changes in the Ottoman Empire, in successive strata. After the abolition of the sultanate on 1 November 1922, the dual title of sultan-caliph disappeared, leaving the caliphate in potential remission.

This essay offers a reflection on the political-religious relevance of the Ottoman caliph in the Maghreb, proving to be a factor of Muslim unity, capable of influencing Arab political discourse and public opinion in the early 20th century. The analysis of the Young Tunisians’ press investigates the nationalist movement’s view of the Ottoman caliph between 1907 and 1918. Focusing on the response to the transformations involving the Ottoman caliph from the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 to the First World War, the article examines Le Tunisien and La Revue du Maghreb , charting the orientation of the Young Tunisians in the face of these changes : the reintroduction of the Ottoman constitution, the deposition of Abdülhamid II , the rise to the throne of Mehmed V , and the rumors for an Arab caliphate. As a result, the analysis of this case study shows the loyalty to the Ottoman caliph by the Young Tunisians. Finally, this approach allows to read the relationship between Young Tunisians and Young Turks from a different angle. Indeed, if the Tunisian nationalists view the Young Turk Revolution and a constitutionalist and liberal political project as a source of inspiration, and, at the same time, they affirm a strong pan- Islamist sentiment.

Purpose This systematic review covers the current stage of research on subtle cognitive impairment with connected speech. It aims at surveying the linguistic features in use to single out those that can best identify patients with mild neurocognitive disorders (mNCDs), whose cognitive changes remain underdiagnosed. Method We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines and proposed a full definition of features for the analysis of speech features. Fifty-one studies met the inclusion criteria. Most of them focused on age-related progressive diseases and included fewer than 30 subjects. Results A total of 384 features labeled with 335 different names was retrieved, yielding various results in discriminating individuals with mNCDs from controls. Conclusions This finding highlights the need for harmonized labels to further investigate mNCDs with linguistic markers. We suggest two different ways of assessing a feature's reliability. We also point out potential methodological issues that remain to be resolved, along with recommendations for reproducible research in the field.

In this commentary, we examine the implications of the failed replication reported by Vaidis et al., which represents the largest multilab attempt to replicate the induced-compliance paradigm in cognitive-dissonance theory. We respond to commentaries on this study and discuss potential explanations for the null findings, including issues with the perceived choice manipulation and various post hoc explanations. Our commentary includes an assessment of the broader landscape of cognitive-dissonance research, revealing pervasive methodological limitations, such as underpowered studies and a lack of open-science practices. We conclude that our replication study and our examination of the literature raise substantial concerns about the reliability of the induced-compliance paradigm and highlight the need for more rigorous research practices in the field of cognitive dissonance.

This essay opens by probing what can be extrapolated about the early performance history of the anonymous comedy The Maid's Metamorphosis (1600), performed by the Children of Paul's, based on its title page statement, internal evidence from the play, and contemporary letters. It argues it may have been conceived as part of the nuptial festivities for Anne Russell and Henry Somerset, Lord Herbert (Blackfriars, 16 June 1600). Then, it moves to consider what the recent revival of the play by Edward's Boys (spring 2024), in England and in France, may reveal about the portability of this show.

The city of Oxyrhynchus, an important Greco-Roman metropolis, has been excavated since 1992 by the Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission. Archaeological work is concentrated on the Upper Necropolis, which has been occupied for more than 1000 years, from the Saite period (650 BC) to the Arab conquest (AD 646). Most of the Roman tombs are concentrated in Sector 22, where Tomb 64 is highlighted as one of the mummies found in its excavation presents an unusual case of death during childbirth. The study of this funerary package will allow us to learn about Roman funerary practices and the physical and magical protection of the most vulnerable.

Southeastern France occupies a key biogeographical position on the lower Rhone corridor, at the interface between southern and northern Europe. It is also at the heart of long‐standing ecological debates about the respective roles of natural and human drivers in shaping the Mediterranean landscape. Molluscan analysis may represent a valuable contribution to this issue. In this paper, land snail assemblages from three calcareous tufa deposits in the Luberon mountain were used to reconstruct Lateglacial and Holocene palaeoenvironments. The Lateglacial communities only differ from the Pleniglacial ones by the development of hygrophilic snails. We note a high moisture budget at the end of the Lateglacial Interstadial (LGI). A patchy, steppe landscape is attested. A time lag in recolonization by woodland species during the LGI is conceivable. The postglacial woodland assemblages then trace a laborious reassembly of forest snail communities. It takes place mainly between c. 8000 and c. 6600 cal. a BP with spatial disparities and delayed recruitments. The French Mediterranean region has not benefitted from the macrorefugia that it would have sheltered or with which it would have been close. Woodlands, however, appear progressively more closed and complex c. 8000 cal. a BP. They reached their optimum c. 7500 to 7400 cal. a BP although their canopy seems to have stayed quite open. Anthropization remained weak during the Early Neolithic. A significant woodland opening is observed in the Early–Middle Neolithic. Human impact becomes clear from the Late Neolithic. Nevertheless, there are substantial differences compared with Basse‐Provence, where a more marked openness of the landscape from 7000 cal. a BP was accompanied by the development of Mediterranean synanthropic snails. The molluscan successions of the Luberon mountain should be a reference for the development of the Lateglacial and Holocene malacofauna in the SE of France, at the northern boundary of the western Mediterranean domain.

Environmental education is important in the face of the climate crisis. Although previous studies suggest that knowledge could boost pro-environmental attitudes, behavioural change is complex and may go beyond knowledge acquisition. Previous research highlighted biospheric and altruistic values as motivational factors related to pro- environmental behaviour (PEB). Video-based education has arisen as an accessible environmental learning medium. Video-sharing platforms offer accurate educational videos, although, it is unclear if they can increase knowledge, PEB or change attitudes. An online experiment randomly allocated 72 students in two conditions to watch an informational video on climate change, with one condition engaging in a values clarification task. Participants completed questionnaires on environmental attitudes, PEB, environmental self-efficacy and knowledge. Cross-correlations indicated complex inter-relationships and a non-significant relationship between knowledge and PEB at baseline. The values clarification task did not offer an advantage on PEB or pro-environmental attitudes. Both conditions experienced increases in knowledge, indicating that watching an educational video on climate change contributes to knowledge acquisition. The findings highlight complex mechanisms involved in increasing pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. The study was part of the project “Be the Change: Innovative Higher Education for Environmental Sustainability,” co-funded by the ERASMUS+ Programme of the European Union (Project number: 2022-1-SE01- KA220-HED-000087275).

Cognitive offloading refers to the use of physical action and the external environment to simplify mental demand. One form of this – intention offloading – involves the use of external reminders to support delayed intentions. Both beliefs of poor memory ability and a preference to avoid cognitive effort lead to offloading intentions rather than using internal memory. Schizophrenia is a population with deficits in prospective memory and to overcome this difficulty, neuropsychological interventions can propose external aids such as reminders. However, it is unknown what motivates individuals with schizophrenia to spontaneously use reminders. Twenty-seven individuals with schizophrenia and twenty-seven non-clinical individuals were recruited to perform a prospective memory task, with two levels of difficulty, by deciding whether to use reminders or their internal memory. The proportion of reminder use, performance (hits and errors), subjective effort and metacognitive beliefs were recorded. The results show a non-optimal use of reminders in the schizophrenia group: this group used more reminders than the non-clinical group when the task was easy but did not increase reminder usage when the task became more difficult. Individuals with schizophrenia perceived the task to be more effortful than the non-clinical individuals in the easy task, but also had a high perception of their memory ability. Effort and metacognition have provided insight into intention offloading in schizophrenia, but their direct influence remains to be demonstrated. The overall results open perspectives on the neuropsychological treatment of prospective memory in this population.