Perspectivism Versus a Completed Copernican Revolution

I discuss changes of perspective of four kinds in science and about science. Section 2 defends a perspectival nonrealism—something akin to Giere’s perspectival realism but not a realism—against the idea of complete, “Copernican” objectivity. Section 3 contends that there is an inverse relationship between epistemological conservatism and scientific progress. Section 4 casts doubt on strong forms of scientific realism by taking a long-term historical perspective that includes future history. Section 5 defends a partial reversal in the status of so-called context of discovery and context of justification. Section 6 addresses the question of how we can have scientific progress without scientific realism—how progress is possible without the accumulation of representational truth. The overall result (Sect. 7) is a pragmatic instrumentalist perspective on the sciences and how to study them philosophically, one that contains a kernel of realism—instrumental realism.     

Local probability effects of repeating irrelevant attributes

We present two experiments in which participants classify stimuli having two potentially conflicting attributes, one of which is response-relevant whereas the other (“irrelevant”) attribute is logically and statistically independent of the response. We introduce a novel design not used with filtering tasks before in which the main factor is the local (i.e., one-step) transition probability π (= 0.25, 0.50, 0.75) that the irrelevant attribute is repeated from one trial to the next. Experiment 1 involved a visual Simon task in which the color of the stimulus is relevant and its location is irrelevant. Experiment 2 used a semantic classification task in which the parity of a digit presented is relevant and its numerical magnitude is irrelevant. The results of both experiments demonstrate that participants in the π = 0.75 group responded faster when the irrelevant attribute is in fact repeated rather than alternated; in contrast, participants in the π = 0.25 group responded faster (Experiment 1) or equally fast (Experiment 2) when the irrelevant attribute is alternated rather than repeated. These expectancy-related effects cannot be attributed to spurious design contingencies as the irrelevant attribute was independent of the relevant attribute (and thus of the response), of the congruency status, and also of their alternation/repetition. One interpretation of our findings is that information about the irrelevant attribute in the previous trial is used much as an informative central precue, so that participants can prepare early processing stages in the current trial, with the corresponding benefits and costs typical of standard cueing studies.     

The texture of causal construals: Domain-specific biases shape causal inferences from discourse

We conducted five sets of experiments asking whether psychological and physical events are construed in broadly different manners concerning the underlying textures of their causes. In Experiments 1a–1d, we found a robust tendency to estimate fewer causes (but not effects) for psychological than for physical events; Experiment 2 showed a similar pattern of results when participants were asked to generate hypothetical causes and effects; Experiment 3 revealed a greater tendency to ascribe linear chains of causes (but not effects) to physical events; Experiment 4 showed that the expectation of linear chains was related to intuitions about deterministic processes; and Experiment 5 showed that simply framing a given ambiguous event in psychological versus physical terms is sufficient to induce changes in the patterns of causal inferences. Adults therefore consistently show a tendency to think about psychological and physical events as being embedded in different kinds of causal structures.     

Chasing red herrings: Memory of distractors causes fixation in creative problem solving

Two experiments tested the red herring retrieval hypothesis, which states that fixation in creative problem solving is worse when memory for red herrings (i.e., inappropriate or incorrect solutions) is strengthened. In Experiment 1, when associations between Remote Associates Test (RAT) problem words (e.g., COTTAGE, SWISS, CAKE) and related red herring words (e.g., hut, chocolate, icing) were strengthened via repetition, an encoding variable, fixation was found to increase. In Experiment 2, when associations were formed between RAT problem contexts and red herrings, then subsequent reinstatement of problem contexts during RAT problem solving trials (as compared with showing new contexts) also worsened fixation effects. Our results add to the increasing body of research that connects memory with creative problem solving, and they suggest possible ways for overcoming fixation effects.     

Exclusion Problems and the Cardinality of Logical Space

Wittgenstein’s atomist picture, as embodied in his Tractatus, is initially very appealing. However, it faces the famous colour-exclusion problem. In this paper, I shall explain when the atomist picture can be defended (in principle) in the face of that problem; and, in the light of this, why the atomist picture should be rejected. I outline the atomist picture in Section 1. In Section 2, I present a very simple necessary and sufficient condition for the tenability (in principle) of the atomist picture. The condition is: logical space is a power of two. In Sections 3 and 4, I outline the colour-exclusion problem, and then show how the cardinality-condition supplies a response to exclusion problems. In Section 5, I explain how this amounts to a distillation of a proposal due to Moss (2012), which goes back to Carruthers (1990: 144–7). And in Section 6, I show how all this vindicates Wittgenstein’s ultimate rejection of the atomist picture. The brief reason is that we have no guarantee that there are any solutions to a given exclusion problem but, if there are any, then there are far too many.     

Hypermnesia and the Role of Delay between Study and Test

Hypermnesia is increased recall across repeated tests in the absence of any further study opportunities. Although over the years many factors have been identified that influence hypermnesia, to date not much is known about the role of delay between study and test for the effect. This study addressed the issue in four experiments. Employing both words and pictures as study material, we compared hypermnesia after shorter delay (3 min or 11.5 min) and longer delay (24 h or 1 week) between study and test. Recall occurred over three successive tests, using both free recall (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and forced recall testing (Experiment 3). In forced recall tests, subjects are instructed to recall as many items as possible, but if unable to remember all studied items, to fill in the remaining spaces with their best guesses. With free recall testing, hypermnesia increased with delay and the effect was driven mainly by reduced item losses between tests. These results suggest a link between hypermnesia and the testing effect, which shows that demanding retrieval practice, as it happens after longer delay, can improve recall by reducing the forgetting of the practiced items. In contrast, with forced recall testing, hypermnesia decreased with delay and was even absent after longer delay. The findings indicate that recall format can influence hypermnesia and different mechanisms may mediate the effects of repeated testing in the two recall conditions.     

Numerosity estimates for attended and unattended items in visual search

The goal of this research was to examine memories created for the number of items during a visual search task. Participants performed a visual search task for a target defined by a single feature (Experiment 1A), by a conjunction of features (Experiment 1B), or by a specific spatial configuration of features (Experiment 1C). On some trials following the search task, subjects were asked to recall the total number of items in the previous display. In all search types, participants underestimated the total number of items, but the severity of the underestimation varied depending on the efficiency of the search. In three follow-up studies (Experiments 2A, 2B, and 2C) using the same visual stimuli, the participants’ only task was to estimate the number of items on each screen. Participants still underestimated the numerosity of the items, although the degree of underestimation was smaller than in the search tasks and did not depend on the type of visual stimuli. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to recall the number of items in a display only once. Subjects still displayed a tendency to underestimate, indicating that the underestimation effects seen in Experiments 1A-1C were not attributable to knowledge of the estimation task. The degree of underestimation depends on the efficiency of the search task, with more severe underestimation in efficient search tasks. This suggests that the lower attentional demands of very efficient searches leads to less encoding of numerosity of the distractor set.     

The concreteness effect on judgments of learning: Evaluating the contributions of fluency and beliefs

Researchers have often determined how cues influence judgments of learning (JOLs; e.g., concrete words are assigned higher JOLs than are abstract words), and recently there has been an emphasis in understanding why cues influence JOLs (i.e., the mechanisms that underlie cue effects on JOLs). The analytic-processing (AP) theory posits that JOLs are constructed in accordance with participants’ beliefs of how a cue will influence memory. Even so, some evidence suggests that fluency is also important to cue effects on JOLs. In the present experiments, we investigated the contributions of participants’ beliefs and processing fluency to the concreteness effect on JOLs. To evaluate beliefs, participants estimated memory performance in a hypothetical experiment (Experiment 1), and studied concrete and abstract words and made a pre-study JOL for each (Experiments 2 and 3). Participants’ predictions demonstrated the belief that concrete words are more likely to be remembered than are abstract words, consistent with the AP theory. To evaluate fluency, response latencies were measured during lexical decision (Experiment 4), self-paced study (Experiment 5), and mental imagery (Experiment 7). Number of trials to acquisition was also evaluated (Experiment 6). Fluency did not differ between concrete and abstract words in Experiments 5 and 6, and it did not mediate the concreteness effect on JOLs in Experiments 4 and 7. Taken together, these results demonstrate that beliefs are a primary mechanism driving the concreteness effect on JOLs.     

Some Notes on Truths and Comprehension

In this paper we study several translations that map models and formulae of the language of second-order arithmetic to models and formulae of the language of truth. These translations are useful because they allow us to exploit results from the extensive literature on arithmetic to study the notion of truth. Our purpose is to present these connections in a systematic way, generalize some well-known results in this area, and to provide a number of new results. Sections 3 and 4 contain some recursion- and proof-theoretic results about Kripke-style fixed-point theories of truth. Section 5 shows how to derive full second-order arithmetic from principles of truth. Section 6 investigates the proof-theoretic strength of disquotation without an arithmetical base theory.     

The mere exposure effect for visual image

Mere exposure effect refers to a phenomenon in which repeated stimuli are evaluated more positively than novel stimuli. We investigated whether this effect occurs for internally generated visual representations (i.e., visual images). In an exposure phase, a 5 × 5 dot array was presented, and a pair of dots corresponding to the neighboring vertices of an invisible polygon was sequentially flashed (in red), creating an invisible polygon. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, participants visualized and memorized the shapes of invisible polygons based on different sequences of flashed dots, whereas in Experiment 3, participants only memorized positions of these dots. In a subsequent rating phase, participants visualized the shape of the invisible polygon from allocations of numerical characters on its vertices, and then rated their preference for invisible polygons (Experiments 1, 2, and 3). In contrast, in Experiment 4, participants rated the preference for visible polygons. Results showed that the mere exposure effect appeared only when participants visualized the shape of invisible polygons in both the exposure and rating phases (Experiments 1 and 2), suggesting that the mere exposure effect occurred for internalized visual images. This implies that the sensory inputs from repeated stimuli play a minor role in the mere exposure effect. Absence of the mere exposure effect in Experiment 4 suggests that the consistency of processing between exposure and rating phases plays an important role in the mere exposure effect.     

Whose hand is this? Differential responses of right and left extrastriate body areas to visual images of self and others’ hands

The extrastriate body area (EBA) is involved in perception of human bodies and nonfacial body parts, but its role in representing body identity is not clear. Here, we used on-line high-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to test the role of EBA in self–other distinction. In Experiments 1 and 2 we compared rTMS of right EBA with stimulation of left ventral premotor cortex (vPM), whereas in Experiment 3 we compared stimulation of right and left EBA. RTMS was applied during a hand laterality task in which self or others’ hand images were presented in first- versus third-person view (Experiments 1 and 3), or while participants had to explicitly recognize their own hands (Experiment 2) presented in first- versus third-person view. Experiment 1 showed that right EBA stimulation selectively speeded judgments on others’ hands, whereas no effect of left vPM stimulation was found. Experiment 2 did not reveal any effect of rTMS. Experiment 3 confirmed faster responses on others’ hands while stimulating right EBA and also showed an advantage when judging self with respect to others’ hands during stimulation of left EBA. These results would demonstrate that EBA responds to morphological features of human body contributing to identity processing.     

Cue quality and criterion setting in recognition memory

Previous studies on how people set and modify decision criteria in old-new recognition tasks (in which they have to decide whether or not a stimulus was seen in a study phase) have almost exclusively focused on properties of the study items, such as presentation frequency or study list length. In contrast, in the three studies reported here, we manipulated the quality of the test cues in a scene-recognition task, either by degrading through Gaussian blurring (Experiment 1) or by limiting presentation duration (Experiment 2 and 3). In Experiments 1 and 2, degradation of the test cue led to worse old-new discrimination. Most importantly, however, participants were more liberal in their responses to degraded cues (i.e., more likely to call the cue “old”), demonstrating strong within-list, item-by-item, criterion shifts. This liberal response bias toward degraded stimuli came at the cost of increasing the false alarm rate while maintaining a constant hit rate. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 with additional stimulus types (words and faces) but did not provide accuracy feedback to participants. The criterion shifts in Experiment 3 were smaller in magnitude than Experiments 1 and 2 and varied in consistency across stimulus type, suggesting, in line with previous studies, that feedback is important for participants to shift their criteria.     

<Emphasis Type="Bold">Assessing priming for prosodic representations: Speaking rate,intonational phrase boundaries,and pitch accenting</Emphasis>

Recent work in the literature on prosody presents a puzzle: Some aspects of prosody can be primed in production (e.g., speech rate), but others cannot (e.g., intonational phrase boundaries, or IPBs). In three experiments we aimed to replicate these effects and identify the source of this dissociation. In Experiment 1 we investigated how speaking rate and the presence of an intonational boundary in a prime sentence presented auditorily affect the production of these aspects of prosody in a target sentence presented visually. Analyses of the targets revealed that participants’ speaking rates, but not their production of boundaries, were affected by the priming manipulation. Experiment 2 verified whether speakers are more sensitive to IPBs when the boundaries provide disambiguating information, and in this different context replicated Experiment 1 in showing no IPB priming. Experiment 3 tested whether speakers are sensitive to another aspect of prosody—pitch accenting—in a similar paradigm. Again, we found no evidence that this manipulation affected pitch accenting in target sentences. These findings are consistent with earlier research and suggest that aspects of prosody that are paralinguistic (like speaking rate) may be more amenable to priming than are linguistic aspects of prosody (such as phrase boundaries and pitch accenting).     

Evidence that photos promote rosiness for claims about the future

When people rapidly judge the truth of claims about the present or the past, a related but nonprobative photo can produce “truthiness,” an increase in the perceived truth of those claims (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). What we do not know is the extent to which nonprobative photos cause truthiness for the future. We addressed this issue in four experiments. In each experiment, people judged the truth of claims that the price of certain commodities (such as manganese) would increase (or decrease). Half of the time, subjects saw a photo of the commodity paired with the claim. Experiments 1A and 1B produced a “rosiness” bias: Photos led people to believe positive claims about the future but had very little effect on people’s belief in negative claims. In Experiment 2, rosiness occurred for both close and distant future claims. In Experiments 3A and 3B, we tested whether rosiness was tied to the perceived positivity of a claim. Finally, in Experiments 4A and 4B, we tested the rosiness hypothesis and found that rosiness was unique to claims about the future: When people made the same judgments about the past, photos produced the usual truthiness pattern for both positive and negative claims. Considered all together, our data fit with the idea that photos may operate as hypothesis-confirming evidence for people’s tendency to anticipate rosy future outcomes.     

Relationship between vection and motion perception in depth

This study examined the effects of cues to motion in depth – namely, stereoscopic (i.e., changing-disparity cues and interocular velocity differences) and changing-size cues on forward and backward vection. We conducted four experiments in which participants viewed expanding or contracting optical flows with the addition of either or both cues. In Experiment 1, participants reported vection by pressing a button whenever they felt it. After each trial, they also rated the magnitude of the vection (from 0 to 100). In Experiments 2 and 3, the participants rated the perceived velocity and motion-in-depth impression of the flows relative to standard stimuli, respectively. In Experiment 4, the participants rated the perceived depth and distance of the display. We observed enhancements in vection, motion-in-depth impression, and perceived depth and distance when either or both types of cues indicated motion-in-depth, as compared to those when the cues did not (Experiments 1, 3, and 4). The perceived velocity changed with cue conditions only for the high velocity condition (Experiment 2). Correlational analyses showed that the vection can be best explained by the motion-in-depth impression. This was partially supported by the multiple regression analyses. These results indicate that the enhancement of vection caused by cues is related to the impression of motion-in-depth rather than the perceived velocity and perceived three-dimensionality.     

Bindings in working memory: The role of object-based attention

Over the past decade, it has been debated whether retaining bindings in working memory (WM) requires more attention than retaining constituent features, focusing on domain-general attention and space-based attention. Recently, we proposed that retaining bindings in WM needs more object-based attention than retaining constituent features (Shen, Huang, & Gao, 2015, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, doi: 10.1037/xhp0000018). However, only unitized visual bindings were examined; to establish the role of object-based attention in retaining bindings in WM, more emperical evidence is required. We tested 4 new bindings that had been suggested requiring no more attention than the constituent features in the WM maintenance phase: The two constituent features of binding were stored in different WM modules (cross-module binding, Experiment 1), from auditory and visual modalities (cross-modal binding, Experiment 2), or temporally (cross-time binding, Experiments 3) or spatially (cross-space binding, Experiments 4–6) separated. In the critical condition, we added a secondary object feature-report task during the delay interval of the change-detection task, such that the secondary task competed for object-based attention with the to-be-memorized stimuli. If more object-based attention is required for retaining bindings than for retaining constituent features, the secondary task should impair the binding performance to a larger degree relative to the performance of constituent features. Indeed, Experiments 1–6 consistently revealed a significantly larger impairment for bindings than for the constituent features, suggesting that object-based attention plays a pivotal role in retaining bindings in WM.     

The metaphysics of goodness in the ethics of Aristotle

Kraut (Against absolute goodness. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011) and other neo-Aristotelians have argued that there is no such thing as absolute goodness. They admit only good in a kind, e.g. a good sculptor, and good for something, e.g. good for fish. What is the view of Aristotle? Mostly limiting myself to the Nicomachean Ethics (NE), I argue that Aristotle is committed to things being absolutely good and also to a metaphysics of absolute goodness where there is a maximally best good that is the cause of the goodness of all other things in virtue of being their end. I begin (in Sect. 2) by suggesting that the notion of good as an end, which is present in the first lines of the NE, is not obviously accounted for by good in a kind or good for something. I then give evidence that good in a kind (in Sect. 3) and good for something (in Sect. 4) can explain neither certain distinctions drawn between virtues nor the determinacy ascribed to what is good “in itself.” I argue (in Sect. 5) contra Gotthelf (2012) that because several important arguments in the Nicomachean Ethics rely on comparative judgments of absolute value—e.g. “Man is the best of all animals”—Aristotle is committed to the existence of both absolute goodness and an absolutely best being. I focus (in Sect. 6) on one passage, Aristotle’s division of goods in NE I 12, which presupposes this metaphysical picture.     

Age of avatar modulates the altercentric bias in a visual perspective-taking task: ERP and behavioral evidence

Despite being able to rapidly and accurately infer their own and other peoples’ visual perspectives, healthy adults experience difficulty ignoring the irrelevant perspective when the two perspectives are in conflict; they experience egocentric and altercentric interference. We examine for the first time how the age of an observed person (adult vs. child avatar) influences adults’ visual perspective-taking, particularly the degree to which they experience interference from their own or the other person’s perspective. Participants completed the avatar visual perspective-taking task, in which they verified the number of discs in a visual scene according to either their own or an on-screen avatar’s perspective (Experiments 1 and 2) or only from their own perspective (Experiment 3), where the two perspectives could be consistent or in conflict. Age of avatar was manipulated between (Experiment 1) or within (Experiments 2 and 3) participants, and interference was assessed using behavioral (Experiments 1–3) and ERP (Experiment 1) measures. Results revealed that altercentric interference is reduced or eliminated when a child avatar was present, suggesting that adults do not automatically compute a child avatar’s perspective. We attribute this pattern to either enhanced visual processing for own-age others or an inference on reduced mental awareness in younger children. The findings argue against a purely attentional basis for the altercentric effect, and instead support an account where both mentalising and directional processes modulate automatic visual perspective-taking, and perspective-taking effects are strongly influenced by experimental context.     

Updating metacognitive control in response to expected retention intervals

In five experiments, we investigated whether expected retention intervals affect subjects’ encoding strategies. In the first four experiments, our subjects studied paired associates consisting of words from the Graduate Record Exam and a synonym. They were told to expect a test on a word pair after either a short or a longer interval. Subjects were tested on most pairs after the expected retention interval. For some pairs, however, subjects were tested after the other retention interval, allowing for a comparison of performance at a given retention interval conditional upon the expected retention interval. No effect of the expected retention interval was found for 1 min versus 4 min (Exp. 1), 30 s versus 3 min (Exp. 2), and 30 s versus 10 min (Exps. 3 and 4), even when subjects were given complete control over the pacing of study items (Exp. 4). However, when the difference between the expected retention intervals was increased massively (10 min vs. 24 h; Exp. 5), subjects remembered more items that they expected to be tested sooner, an effect consistent with the idea that they traded off efforts to remember items for the later test versus items that were about to be tested. Overall, this set of results accords with much of the test-expectancy literature, revealing that subjects are often reluctant to adjust encoding strategies on an item-by-item basis, and when they do, they usually make quantitative, rather than qualitative, adjustments.