WHAT IS ANIMALISM?

One increasingly popular approach to personal identity is called ‘animalism.’ Unfortunately, it is unclear just what the doctrine says. In this paper, I criticise several different ways of stating animalism, and put forward one formulation that I find more promising.     

Intuition,intelligence, data compression

The main goal of my paper is to argue that data compression is a necessary condition for intelligence. One key motivation for this proposal stems from a paradox about intuition and intelligence. For the purposes of this paper, it will be useful to consider playing board games—such as chess and Go—as a paradigm of problem solving and cognition, and computer programs as a model of human cognition. I first describe the basic components of computer programs that play board games, namely value functions and search functions. I then argue that value functions both play the same role as intuition in humans and work in essentially the same way. However, as will become apparent, using an ordinary value function is just a simpler and less accurate form of relying on a database or lookup table. This raises our paradox, since reliance on intuition is usually considered to manifest intelligence, whereas usage of a lookup table is not. I therefore introduce another condition for intelligence that is related to data compression. This proposal allows that even reliance on a perfectly accurate lookup table can be nonintelligent, while retaining the claim that reliance on intuition can be highly intelligent. My account is not just theoretically plausible, but it also captures a crucial empirical constraint. This is because all systems with limited resources that solve complex problems—and hence, all cognitive systems—need to compress data.

     

Individual response profiles in the behavioral assessment of personality

A long-standing problem in the behavioural assessment of personality is the individual specificity of responses. Often, different persons externalize the same trait in different responses. One solution to this problem is to aggregate many different responses. The paper compares the power of response aggregation for predicting self-and other-ratings of personality with two alternative strategies of response selection: the nomothetic strategy of selecting the response with the highest overall predictive power, and the more idiographic strategy of selecting, for each individual, the most extreme response. Seventy subjects were videotaped in a sequence of social situations inducing shyness to various degrees. Five different nonverbal measures of shyness all correlated significantly with the subjects' self- or other-rated shyness, and showed low correlations across subjects and a substantial cross-situational consistency of response profiles. Response aggregation and both strategies of response selection were found to be equally powerful in predicting the subjects' self- and other-ratings of shyness from the five behavioural responses. Therefore, these findings somewhat dampen the hope often expressed in recent theoretical discussions of personality assessment that more respect for the individual case may improve nomothetic assessment procedures.     

Mentally retarded persons as parents: Prevalence and the situation of their children

This paper describes a research program on mentally retarded parents and their children. For this nation-wide study, two structured questionnaires were sent to all municipalities in Norway. Both questionnaires were sent to public health nurses and were followed-up by a structured telephone interview based on the questionnaires. The primary aim of the study was to survey the number of children born to mentally retarded parents. In addition, the children's needs and functional abilities were to be assessed. Twenty-three mentally retarded persons had given birth in the course of the past twelve months. A total of 126 children with mentally retarded parents were identified, with an incidence of 27 children per year, and a prevalence of approximately 430 children under 16 years of age in a population of 4 mill. People with a mean of 1.05 child per family. About 43% of the children of mentally retarded parents appeared to have learning difficulties. Forty percent of the children suffered from failures of care. Between 25% and 68% of the children with learning problems had poorly developed motor or language abilities, sense modalities or psycho-social status.     

A vector graphic CRT display system

A vector graphic CRT display system for research in visual information processing is described. The vector graphic processor includes a 4K-byte display memory. The processor communicates with the controlling computer via a serial channel. The system is capable of exposure durations below 1 msec, and it allows on-line generation and modification of display files during an experiment. Brightness can be controlled separately for each vector of a picture. A graphic display editor in FORTRAN IV for interactive editing and debugging of display files has been developed.     

Letter familiarity does not aid feature extraction

Summary Familiarity effects in visual letter processing were examined by means of a mutilation detection task. The uppercase E was used as the non-mutilated letter. One or two horizontal bars of the E were delected, to produce an upright or inverted F or L. These four mutilations of the E were assigned to the same response. In Experiment 1, brief exposure of the stimuli was followed by a backward mask. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that the display duration of the stimulus was increased and the backward mask was omitted. In Experiment 3, the overall luminance of the stimuli (luminance per point times length of the constituent line segments) was held constant. In Experiment 4, the upright and inverted non-E letter occurred in different blocks to encourage a normal (upright) letter processing strategy in the upright letter blocks. Accuracy (Experiment 1) and mean correct response times (all experiments) were not different for the upright and inverted F or for the upright and inverted L. These findings and converging results from other studies indicate that the higher familiarity of the upright letters did not aid feature extraction.     

S-multiplicativity of a stochastic matrix and applications to visual identification

A stochastic matrix is called S-multiplicative if the conditional probabilities in a specific subset S of its cells can be factorized into the product of two functions depending on the rows and columns, respectively. The concept of S-multiplicativity is related to Goodman's concept of quasi-independence and generalizes Falmagne's concept of a multiplicative confusion matrix, where S consists of the cells lying outside the main diagonal ($\text{D}$-multiplicativity). In the present study, the notion of S-multiplicativity is applied to the analysis of visual identification performance. The confusion matrices obtained from three identification experiments are tested for predictions of S-multiplicativity derived from the multicomponent theory of perception. If the stimuli do not overlap, i.e., different stimuli have no features in common, then the theory predicts a $\text{D}$-multiplicative confusion matrix. Alternatively, in the case of overlapping stimuli the theory predicts S-multiplicativity with respect to a more severely restricted subset S. These predictions are confirmed by the data.     

Is phonological information mapped onto semantic information in a one-to-one manner?

Spoken word recognition models have to explain the influence of mismatching information on lexical activation. The effect of mismatching information is usually addressed with cross-modal semantic priming experiments using priming effects as a measure of the degree of lexical activation. Pseudowords phonologically related to a semantic associate of the target, e.g., *domato-PAPRIKA, serve as primes. Mismatch effects at the word form level are supposed to percolate unaltered to the semantic level. We show that cross-modal semantic priming might underestimate activation at the word form level. Targets (e.g., PAPRIKA) were preceded by either phonologically related pseudoword primes (e.g., *baprika) or semantically related pseudoword primes (e.g., *domato). Different priming and RT patterns were obtained for the two priming relations.     

How global versus local perception fits regulatory focus

We propose a reciprocal relation between regulatory-focus systems and global versus local processing styles-specifically, that global processing fits a promotion focus on advancement, whereas local processing fits a prevention focus on security. In Study 1, participants were shown large letters made of small letters and decided if either of two specific letters appeared on the screen. Strength of promotion focus was positively correlated with speed of processing global letters and negatively correlated with speed of processing local letters, whereas the reverse was true for strength of prevention focus. In Study 2, participants first worked on a global or local task and later chose between two objects. Consistent with our fit proposal, participants who had performed the global task assigned a higher price to their chosen object if they had chosen it in a promotive, eager manner than if they had chosen it in a preventive, vigilant manner, whereas the reverse was true for participants who had performed the local task.