The distinctiveness of the word-length effect

The authors report 2 experiments that compare the serial recall of pure lists of long words, pure lists of short words, and lists of long or short words containing just a single isolated word of a different length. In both experiments for pure lists, there was a substantial recall advantage for short words; the isolated words were recalled better than other words in the same list, and there was a reverse word-length effect: Isolated long words were recalled better than isolated short words. These results contradict models that seek to explain the word-length effect in terms of list-based accounts of rehearsal speed or in terms of item-based effects (such as difficulty of assembling items).     

The microstructural causation hypothesis

I argue against a priori objections to the view that causation may be reducible to some micro-structural process in principle discoverable by physics. I distinguish explanation from causation, and argue that the main objections to such a reduction stem from conflating these two notions. Explanation is the collection of pragmatically relevant, possibly counterfactual information about causation; and causation is to be identified in a necessary a posteriori way with whatever physical processes underwrite our explanatory claims.I am grateful to Frank Jackson, Oscar Manhal, Peter Menzies, Philip Pettit and Huw Price for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Since an earlier draft, I have heard of the death of Oscar Manhal. Oscar did not agree with the line defended here; but it is better defended for his disagreement. He will be greatly missed.     

Mental causation as multiple causation

The paper argues that mental causation can be explained from the sufficiency of counterfactual dependence for causation together with relatively weak assumptions about the metaphysics of mind. If a physical event counterfactually depends on an earlier physical event, it also counterfactually depends on, and hence is caused by, a mental event that correlates with (or supervenes on) this earlier physical event, provided that this correlation (or supervenience) is sufficiently modally robust. This account of mental causation is consistent with the overdetermination of physical events by mental events and other physical events, but does not entail it.

The pursuit of optimal distinctiveness and consumer preferences

He, L., Cong, F., Liu, Y. & Zhou, X. (2010). The pursuit of optimal distinctiveness and consumer preferences. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 411–417. This article investigates the effect of optimal distinctiveness on consumer product consumption. The authors argue that consumers acquire and display material possessions to restore their optimal levels of distinctiveness. Results showed that placing consumers in a state of low distinctiveness increased desire to acquire distinctive products, whereas perceptions of high distinctiveness reduced desire to acquire such products. Consumers’ desire for distinctiveness‐related products held true for various consumer choices, including willingness to pay more for limited‐edition products and preference for unpopular gifts. This finding has implications for understanding consumer choice in expressing identity.     

Orthographie distinctiveness of homonyms

Ratings of orthographic distinctiveness were obtained for 139 homonym pairs. Mean ratings on a 9-point scale ranged from 7.75 to 2.44. Reliability of the ratings was high (r = .91). In addition, orthographic distinctiveness was found to be independent of disparity in perceived meanings of the separate homonym forms.     

The role of target distinctiveness in infant perseverative reaching

From a dynamic systems perspective, perseverative errors in infancy arise from the interaction of the perceptual cues with the memory of previous actions. To evaluate this account, we tested 9-month-old infants in a task in which they reached for two targets. Experimenters repeatedly cued the first target, which always matched the background (A), and then cued the second target, which varied in its distinctiveness (B). We predicted that a sufficiently distinctive B target would lessen perseverative responding. Results showed that infants perseverated when reaching for two identical targets, but that they made nonperseverative responses when reaching in the presence of a highly distinctive B target. Reach direction on each trial was jointly determined by the distinctiveness of the target, the immediately preceding perceptual events, and the history of reaches in the task.     

The effects of distinctiveness in recognising and classifying faces

In an earlier study it was found that distinctive familiar faces were recognised faster than typical familiar faces in a familiarity decision task. In the first experiment reported here this effect was replicated with the use of celebrities' faces rather than personally familiar faces. In the second and third experiments the effect of distinctiveness was found to reverse if the task was to distinguish between faces and jumbled faces. Subjects took longer to classify distinctive faces as faces than they did to classify typical faces. Thus distinctive faces were recognised faster, but were classified as faces more slowly than were typical faces, both when personally familiar faces and when famous faces were used as stimuli. These results are interpeted as evidence that faces are encoded by reference to a general face prototype.     

The effects of cue distinctiveness on odor-based context-dependent memory

The distinctiveness of an ambient odor was examined in relation to its success as a cue in contextdependent memory. Distinctiveness was examined in terms of both cue novelty and contextual appropriateness. Two experiments were conducted in which three different ambient odors that varied in familiarity and contextual appropriateness were manipulated at an incidental word learning encoding session and at a free recall retrieval session 48 h later. Experiment 1 revealed that when a novel ambient odor (osmanthus) was the available context cue, word recall was better than in any other condition. Further, among familiar odor cues, recall was better with a contextually inappropriate odor (peppermint) than with a contextually appropriate odor (clean fresh pine). Experiment 2 confirmed that superior word recall with osmanthus and peppermint depended on the odor cue’s being available at both encoding and retrieval, and that the relation of an odor to the situational context is a key factor for predicting its effectiveness as a retrieval cue.     

Rated graphic distinctiveness of consonants

Mean ratings of graphic distinctiveness were obtained for pairs of consonants. The comparisons were between uppercase forms of different consonants, lowercase forms of different consonants, and uppercase vs lowercase forms of the same consonants. The ratings were demonstrated to have satisfactory reliability and to covary moderately well with feature-component measures of letter-pair distinctiveness.     

General causation

This paper outlines a general theory of efficient causation, a theory that deals in a unified way with traditional or deterministic, indeterministic, probabilistic, and other causal concepts. Theorists like Lewis, Salmon, and Suppes have attempted to broaden our causal perspective by reductively analysing causal notions in other terms. By contrast, the present theory rests in the first place on a non-reductive analysis of traditional causal concepts — into formal or structural components, on the one hand, and a physical or metaphysical component, on the other. The analyzans is then generalised. The theory also affords a more general propensity notion than is standard, one that helps solve major problems facing propensity interpretations of probability.     

Understanding causation

Synthese - In Part I of ‘Causality and Determination” (CD), Anscombe writes that (1) we understand causality through understanding specific causal expressions, (2) efficient causation...     

Metaphysics of causation

Conclusion The world contains not only causes and effects, but also causal relations holding between causes and effects. Because causal relations enter into the structure of the world, their presence has various modal and probabilistic consequences. Causation and necessary and sufficient conditions do often go hand in hand. Causation, however, is a robust ingredient within the world itself, whereas modalities and probabilities supervene on the nature of the world as a whole, and on the resulting relations between one possible world and others. Some modalities, therefore, are essentially causal; but causation is not essentially modal.¹⁹     

Representing causation

The dynamics model, which is based on L. Talmy's (1988) theory of force dynamics, characterizes causation as a pattern of forces and a position vector. In contrast to counterfactual and probabilistic models, the dynamics model naturally distinguishes between different cause-related concepts and explains the induction of causal relationships from single observations. Support for the model is provided in experiments in which participants categorized 3-D animations of realistically rendered objects with trajectories that were wholly determined by the force vectors entered into a physics simulator. Experiments 1-3 showed that causal judgments are based on several forces, not just one. Experiment 4 demonstrated that people compute the resultant of forces using a qualitative decision rule. Experiments 5 and 6 showed that a dynamics approach extends to the representation of social causation. Implications for the relationship between causation and time are discussed.     

The distinctiveness heuristic in false recognition and false recall

The effects of generative processing on false recognition and recall were examined in four experiments using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory paradigm (Deese, 1959 Deese, J. 1959. On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58: 17–22. [Crossref], [PubMed] , [Google Scholar]; Roediger & McDermott, 1995 Roediger, H. L. and McDermott, K. B. 1995. Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21: 803–814. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In each experiment, a Generate condition in which subjects generated studied words from audio anagrams was compared to a Control condition in which subjects simply listened to studied words presented normally. Rates of false recognition and false recall were lower for critical lures associated with generated lists, than for critical lures associated with control lists, but only in between-subjects designs. False recall and recognition did not differ when generate and control conditions were manipulated within-subjects. This pattern of results is consistent with the distinctiveness heuristic (Schacter, Israel, & Racine, 1999 Schacter, D. L., Israel, L. and Racine, C. 1999. Suppressing false recognition in younger and older adults: The distinctiveness heuristic. Journal of Memory and Language, 40: 1–24. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), a metamemorial decision-based strategy whereby global changes in decision criteria lead to reductions of false memories. This retrieval-based monitoring mechanism appears to operate in a similar fashion in reducing false recognition and false recall.