Magna Charta and Parliament 1900-1914

In 1915 plans for the celebration of the 700th anniversary of Magna Carta had to be dropped following the outbreak of the First World War. Such celebrations marked a sense of Magna Carta as an event in the history of these islands. The usage of the term Magna Carta in Parliament in the run-up to the First World War, however, shows that its granting was not seen only as a significant historical event to be memorialised. During the period from 1900, opening with war in South Africa and ending in 1914 with war throughout Europe, the Great Charter was mentioned 85 times in Parliament. As a period marked by a lengthy constitutional crisis in 1909-11 and beset with problems in Ireland and the Empire, this seems like a good case study period to choose. This short paper attempts to analyse how and why it was invoked in Parliament in the years and what these various usages tell us about how Magna Carta was understood at the time.

Investigating the causal role of rightOFA in holistic detection of Mooney faces and objects: an fMRI-guided TMS study

Background The right occipital face area (rOFA) is known to be involved in face discrimination based on local featural information. Whether this region is involved in global, holistic stimulus processing is not known. Objective We used fMRI-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate whether rOFA is causally implicated in stimulus detection based on holistic processing, by the use of Mooney stimuli. Methods Two studies were carried out: In Experiment 1, participants performed a detection task involving Mooney faces and Mooney objects; Mooney stimuli lack distinguishable local features and can be detected solely via holistic processing (i.e. at a global level) with top-down guidance from previously stored representations. Experiment 2 required participants to detect shapes which are recognized via bottom-up integration of local (collinear) Gabor elements and was performed to control for specificity of rightOFA's implication in holistic detection. Results In Experiment 1, TMS over rOFA and rLO impaired detection of all stimulus categories, with no category-specific effect. In Experiment 2, shape detection was impaired when TMS was applied over rLO but not over rOFA. Conclusions Our results demonstrate that rOFA is causally implicated in the type of top-down holistic detection required by Mooney stimuli and that such role is not face-selective. In contrast, rOFA does not appear to play a causal role in in detection of shapes based on bottom-up integration of local components, demonstrating that its involvement in processing non-face stimuli is specific for holistic processing.