Biblical and Ancient Studies (UNISA)

Does the curriculum content of Biblical Archaeology as being taught at the University of South Africa (UNISA) develop the skills necessary for, and expected by the students and the market place? What motivates students to register for post graduate studies in religion? How can these questions be answered with scientific rigour? One could expect that these students would like to deepen their faith. Empirical research into student motivation for studying Biblical Archaeology, however, paints another picture -suggesting a pilgrimage of discovery. This is one of the interesting results that can be obtained through a simple empirical survey questionnaire. By posing nine questions, over 100 pieces of information can be obtained. Historically, research methodologies employed in Biblical Studies have been based on the phenomenological paradigm. By employing a positivist approach, the results of research conducted into student motivation for studying Biblical Archaeology at UNISA, provide far deeper insights into student profiles, motivations and expectations. Teaching staff, not only in Biblical Archaeology, need to be equipped to understand this information which can be obtained through empirical investigation. Seen from this angle, Biblical Archaeology is not merely about teaching how to turn stonesit is to be taught to turn life into a meaningful journey through the past, while keeping an eye on the present, and it could be done by including course material such as aspects of tourism in a space where people of all convictions can participate in the journey. A 1 Erik Cohen, Contemporary Tourism (Oxford: Elsevier, 2004), 2.

The present study focused on the movements that owls perform before they swoop down on their prey. The working hypothesis was that owl head movements reflect the capacity to efficiently follow visually and auditory a moving prey. To test this hypothesis, five tame barn owls (Tyto alba) were each exposed 10 times to a live vole in a laboratory setting that enabled us to simultaneously record the behavior of both owl and vole. Bi-dimensional analysis of the horizontal and vertical projections of movements revealed that owl head movements increased in amplitude parallel to the vole's direction of movement (sideways or away from/toward the owl). However, the owls also performed relatively large repetitive horizontal head movements when the voles were progressing in any direction, suggesting that these movements were critical for the owl to accurately locate the prey, independent of prey behavior. From the pattern of head movements we conclude that owls orient toward the prospective clash point, and then return to the target itself (the vole)a pattern that fits an interception rather than a tracking mode of following a moving target. The large horizontal component of head movement in following live prey may indicate that barn owls either have a horizontally narrow fovea or that these movements serve in forming a motion parallax along with preserving image acuity on a horizontally wide fovea.

Aiming at the question of whether barn owls favor to strike a moving or a stationary prey, we scrutinized the timing of launching 50 attacks of five barn owls (10 attacks/owl) in a captive environment. Attacks on stationary voles outnumbered attacks on moving voles, but this could merely reflect the higher portion of time during which voles were stationary. Notably, the majority of attacks (85-100%) were launched in less than 2 s (measured at accuracy of 0.04 s) after the voles ceased to progress or initiated progression. Therefore, the trigger for launching an attack is the transition of the prey from locomotion to still posture or vice versa.

Rituals are common in religion, sports, culture, and specific life-stages (childhood, parenthood, etc.), raising the question of why being engaged in such activity, what could be its benefit, and how rigid they are. Here we analyzed 19 episodes of a Zulu Umsindo dance performed by 10 women. This ritual comprised a common act performed in all dance episodes of all women, personal acts performed consistently by one woman but not by the others, and sporadic acts that varied both among and within women. There were significantly more sporadic than personal acts, and more personal than common acts, with only one common act that was performed in all 19 dance episodes. Personal and sporadic acts comprised about 90% of the dance repertoire, attesting a high flexibility in performance. Despite this high flexibility, the dance attained a seemingly rigid form due to three properties: (i) fixed temporal order that was preserved in all the dance episodes; (ii) a common act that was consistently performed by all women; and (iii) a high rate of repetition of the common act. These properties rendered the ritual its rigid form, along with enabling the dancers to display great flexibility in act repertoire. This analysis sheds new light on the content and structure of collective rituals, implicating on the understanding of how social transmission may occur, and giving potential evidence for the Sperberian view on cultural transmission. Finally, the Zulu dance seems to possess a communicative value in group solidarity without a direct involvement of precautionary systems.

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter-laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners' judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communic...

Supplemental material, BryantSupplementalMaterial for The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies by Gregory A. Bryant, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Riccardo Fusaroli, Edward Clint, Dorsa Amir, Brenda Chávez, Kaleda K. Denton, Cinthya Díaz, Lealaiauloto Togiaso Duran, Jana Fanćovićová, Michal Fux, Erni Farida Ginting, Youssef Hasan, Anning Hu, Shanmukh V. Kamble, Tatsuya Kameda, Kiri Kuroda, Norman P. Li, Francesca R. Luberti, Raha Peyravi, Pavol Prokop, Katinka J. P. Quintelier, Hyun Jung Shin, Stefan Stieger, Lawrence S. Sugiyama, Ellis A. van den Hende, Hugo Viciana-Asensio, Saliha Elif Yildizhan, Jose C. Yong, Tessa Yuditha and Yi Zhou in Psychological Science

Rituals are common in religion, sports, culture and specifijic life-stages (childhood, parenthood, etc.), raising the question of why being engaged in such activity, what could be its benefijit, and how rigid they are. Here we analyzed 19 episodes of a Zulu Umsindo dance performed by 10 women. This ritual comprised a common act, performed in all dance episodes of all women, personal acts performed consistently by one woman but not by the others, and sporadic acts that varied both among and within women. There were signifijicantly more sporadic than personal acts, and more personal than common acts, with only one common act that was performed in all 19 dance episodes. Personal and sporadic acts comprised about 90% of the dance repertoire, attesting a high flexibility in performance. Despite this high flexibility, the dance attained a seemingly rigid form due to three properties: (i) fijixed temporal order that was preserved in all the dance episodes; (ii) a common act that was consistently performed by all women; and (iii) a high rate of repetition of the common act. These properties rendered the ritual its rigid form, along with enabling the dancers to display great flexibility in act repertoire. This analysis sheds new light on the content and structure of collective rituals, implicating on the understanding of how social transmission may occur, and giving potential evidence for the Sperberian view on cultural transmission. Finally, the Zulu dance seems to possess a communicative value in group solidarity without a direct involvement of precautionary systems.

Despite frequent reliance on conventional wisdom (CW) about potential threats in political, policy, intelligence, and other domains, until now there have been few empirical studies addressing the spread, common features, or differences of precautionary preoccupations across ecologies. We describe some of our initial investigations of any significant variation or subordination of dominant potential danger themes within and between populations and ecologies. We hypothesized that ecological triggers and specific cognitive capacities constrain the dominance of particular precautionary themes generally, as well as their variability between distinct populations. Our initial results support these claims by indicating that females, cross-culturally, worried more about predation/assault threats than males (a universal tendency) and that South Africans were more worried about predation/ assault and depletion of resources than their counterparts in the United Kingdom (a variation). Furthermore, non-white South Africans were more worried in all domains when compared to white South Africans.

We analysed a Zulu wedding ritual, posing two questions: (i) what makes a ritual stereotyped and rigid along with preserving certain flexibility; and (ii) does a ritual pass between generations and individuals en bloc, or as a smaller subset of acts? We found that the ritual repertoire constituted only one act that was common to all individuals that performed the ritual. Repetitive performance of this act conveyed the impression of a stereotyped ritual. This structure eases the transmission of the ritual, since it is only necessary to learn the performance of one act that can then be embedded in a sequence of ‘free-style’ acts. Gender difference was minimal, but young women performed more acts than adults, perhaps as a reflection of them being inexperienced actors. Altogether, the present study unveils underlying mechanisms that seem to characterize the evolution of rituals and thereby highlighting a foundation of human cultural behaviour in general.

Researchers have identified patterns of intuitive thinking that are commonly used to understand and reason about the biological world. These cognitive construals (anthropic, teleological, and essentialist thinking), while useful in everyday life, have also been associated with misconceptions about biological science. Although construal-based thinking is pervasive among students, we know little about the prevalence of construal-consistent language in the university science classroom. In the current research, we characterized the degree to which construal-consistent language is present in biology students’ learning environments. To do so, we coded transcripts of instructor’s speech in 90 undergraduate biology classes for the presence of construal-consistent language. Classes were drawn from two universities with very different student demographic profiles and represented 18 different courses aimed at nonmajors and lower- and upper-division biology majors. Results revealed construal-co...

Students enter educational settings with complex and well-established intuitive conceptual understandings of the world, which have important educational consequences. In biology, intuitive thinking can be characterized in terms of cognitive construals (anthropocentric, teleological, and essentialist thinking, Coley & Tanner, 2015). We examined relations between intuitive thinking and biological misconceptions, and how formal biology education might influence such relations. 137 biology and non-science majors completed measures of anthropocentric, teleological, and essentialist thinking, and indicated agreement/disagreement with common misconceptions and explained their responses. Teleological thinking (but not anthropocentric or essentialist thinking) predicted teleological misconceptions. Anthropocentric and teleological thinking (but not essentialist thinking) predicted anthropocentric misconceptions. Agreement with essentialist misconceptions was unrelated to intuitive thinking. ...