Another way to think about psychological change: experiential vs. incremental

The traditional pre-post treatment difference reflects an incremental notion of change, where a quantity of some psychological function is added to (or subtracted from) a pretreatment quantity. This study presents a complementary, experiential notion of change. Rather than a difference, change is a feeling or experience of having changed, a feeling that one is different than before. Based on a post-treatment interview the Change after Psychotherapy (CHAP) is a method to quantify/rate such ‘differentness’ in terms of how extensively or radically the patient feels having changed. A pre-post quasi-experimental study (N = 49) comparing the CHAP with ratings on the Global Assessment of Functioning, the Karolinska Psychodynamic Profile and the Comprehensive Psychopathological Rating Scale-Self-Affective is reported. The results showed the CHAP to be a reliable, valid and sensitive way to assess an experiential kind of CHAP.     

Between realism and nominalism: learning to think about names and words

Some of the factors that influence our understanding of the nature of names and words were investigated. Participants (from kindergarten, 2nd, 4th, and 6th grades, and a university undergraduate class) were told a series of brief narratives thematizing the relation between objects and names, after which they were asked questions about the origins and changeability of names and words. Responses were coded as either realist (i.e., viewing names as intrinsic properties of objects) or nominalist (i.e., understanding names and words as arbitrary social conventions). By Grade 2, the children showed a significant increase in nominalist thinking, but this was not a universal development among the participants. Many adults expressed views that did not reflect a strictly nominalist understanding of words and names. Furthermore, the use of nominalist and realist models was influenced by various social-discursive factors including the type of object being named, the type of name being asked about, and the participant's prior experience with the name. It is argued that linguistic (especially literate) experiences play a crucial role in developing a nominalist understanding of names and words.     

Scalar consequentialism the right way

Rightness and wrongness come in degrees that vary on a continuous scale. Examples in which agents have many options that morally differ from each other demonstrate this. I suggest ways to develop scalar consequentialism, which treats the rightness and wrongness of actions as matters of degree, and explains them in terms of the value of the actions’ consequences. Scalar consequentialism has a variety of linguistic resources for understanding unsuffixed “right.” It also has advantages over some deontological theories in accounting for rightness.     

Doing cognitive neuroscience: a third way

The “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches have been thought to exhaust the possibilities for doing cognitive neuroscience. We argue that neither approach is likely to succeed in providing a theory that enables us to understand how cognition is achieved in biological creatures like ourselves. We consider a promising third way of doing cognitive neuroscience, what might be called the “neural dynamic systems” approach, that construes cognitive neuroscience as an autonomous explanatory endeavor, aiming to characterize in its own terms the states and processes responsible for brain-based cognition. We sketch the basic motivation for the approach, describe a particular version of the approach, so-called ‘Dynamic Causal Modeling’ (DCM), and consider a concrete example of DCM. This third way, we argue, has the potential to avoid the problems that afflict the other two approaches.     

Where cognitive development and aging meet: face learning ability peaks after age 30

Research on age-related cognitive change traditionally focuses on either development or aging, where development ends with adulthood and aging begins around 55 years. This approach ignores age-related changes during the 35 years in-between, implying that this period is uninformative. Here we investigated face recognition as an ability that may mature late relative to other abilities. Using data from over 60,000 participants, we traced the ability to learn new faces from pre-adolescence through middle age. In three separate experiments, we show that face learning ability improves until just after age 30 – even though other putatively related abilities (inverted face recognition and name recognition) stop showing age-related improvements years earlier. Our data provide the first behavioral evidence for late maturation of face processing and the dissociation of face recognition from other abilities over time demonstrates that studies on adult age development can provide insight into the organization and development of cognitive systems.     

Kant and the Conventionality of Simultaneity

In his Third Analogy of Experience, Kant argues that a universal system of mutual causal interaction-at-a-distance is presupposed in the very construction of experience, and thereby also can be assumed to hold of objects of experience qua appearances. This implies in turn a notion of objective simultaneity. I discuss whether Kant's project is rendered wholly obsolete by the relativity and conventionality of simultaneity as it is now understood under the theory of relativity. I conclude that, while major parts of his project are indeed obsolete, there may still be useful insights into time-awareness to be gleaned from his work.     

Culture: Copying,Compression, and Conventionality

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible (Kirby, Cornish, & Smith, 2008 ; Smith, Tamariz, & Kirby, 2013 ). Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning (storing patterns in memory) and reproducing (producing the patterns again). This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation.     

The artful dodger: answering the wrong question the right way

What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more negatively. We propose that dodges go undetected because listeners' attention is not usually directed toward a goal of dodge detection (i.e., Is this person answering the question?) but rather toward a goal of social evaluation (i.e., Do I like this person?). Listeners were not blind to all dodge attempts, however. Dodge detection increased when listeners' attention was diverted from social goals toward determining the relevance of the speaker's answers (Study 1), when speakers answered a question egregiously dissimilar to the one asked (Study 2), and when listeners' attention was directed to the question asked by keeping it visible during speakers' answers (Study 4). We also examined the interpersonal consequences of dodge attempts: When listeners were guided to detect dodges, they rated speakers more negatively (Study 2), and listeners rated speakers who answered a similar question in a fluent manner more positively than speakers who answered the actual question but disfluently (Study 3). These results add to the literatures on both Gricean conversational norms and goal-directed attention. We discuss the practical implications of our findings in the contexts of interpersonal communication and public debates.     

Family patterns leading to learning disability: A cognitive approach

Traditional treatment of the learning disabled child seeks to offer an individualized remediation. The authors offer as an alternative the innovative use of the family therapy modality for treatment of the learning dysfunction. This approaches the source of the learning dysfunction embedded in the faulty communication patterns within the family. The child has the opportunity to experience and more accurately comprehend the communication patterns, become more adept at interpretation of implicit meanings, and to transfer these developing skills to the formal learning situation.     

Dreams: an empirical way to settle the discussion between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness

Cognitive theories claim, whereas non-cognitive theories deny, that cognitive access is constitutive of phenomenology. Evidence in favor of non-cognitive theories has recently been collected by Block and is based on the high capacity of participants in partial-report experiments compared to the capacity of the working memory. In reply, defenders of cognitive theories have searched for alternative interpretations of such results that make visual awareness compatible with the capacity of the working memory; and so the conclusions of such experiments remain controversial. Instead of entering the debate between alternative interpretations of partial-report experiments, this paper offers an alternative line of research that could settle the discussion between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness. Here I relate the neural correlates of cognitive access to empirical research into the neurophysiology of dreams; cognitive access seems to depend on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, that area is strongly deactivated during sleep; a period when we entertain conscious experiences: dreams. This approach also avoids the classic objection that consciousness should be inextricably tied to reportability or it would fall outside the realm of science.     

A cognitive complexity metric applied to cognitive development

Two experiments tested predictions from a theory in which processing load depends on relational complexity (RC), the number of variables related in a single decision. Tasks from six domains (transitivity, hierarchical classification, class inclusion, cardinality, relative-clause sentence comprehension, and hypothesis testing) were administered to children aged 3-8 years. Complexity analyses indicated that the domains entailed ternary relations (three variables). Simpler binary-relation (two variables) items were included for each domain. Thus RC was manipulated with other factors tightly controlled. Results indicated that (i) ternary-relation items were more difficult than comparable binary-relation items, (ii) the RC manipulation was sensitive to age-related changes, (iii) ternary relations were processed at a median age of 5 years, (iv) cross-task correlations were positive, with all tasks loading on a single factor (RC), (v) RC factor scores accounted for 80% (88%) of age-related variance in fluid intelligence (compositionality of sets), (vi) binary- and ternary-relation items formed separate complexity classes, and (vii) the RC approach to defining cognitive complexity is applicable to different content domains.     

Climate change,justice and the right to development

The primary human rights documents of the United Nations claim that every human has a right to development, a right that also includes continuous improvement of each person's living conditions. On one interpretation, this implies a right to a never-ending improvement of living conditions. According to the author, this interpretation faces several counterintuitive implications. First, it seems reasonable that we cannot have a right to improvement without regard to environmental sustainability; improvements must instead focus on well-being, a concept that is partially unrelated to material improvements. Second, if development is a human right, there are several distributional problems with this right. The paper discusses three different responses to the idea that everybody has a right to continuous improvement and concludes that the best solution is to reject the idea that everyone has such a right. This does not imply that we must reject a right to a certain minimum level of well-being; it just means that this right cannot include claims for never-ending improvement.