What makes targets redundant?

Two letter-classification experiments that investigated target-redundancy effects on reaction time (RT) were conducted. Both experiments were replicated with choice reaction time (CRT) and go/no-go (GNG) procedures. In each experiment, there were two single-target conditions, one with a noise letter and one without. In one experiment, the letter classes were two letters that could be of either case. In the second experiment, each class consisted of two different capital letters. In both experiments, there were two redundant-targets conditions, one with identical targets and one with the different members of a class. In both of the GNG experiments, redundancy gains were obtained comparing the different-targets condition with the no-noise, single-target condition. Redundant stimuli are ones that lead to the same response. Visually different stimuli may be processed in parallel and jointly activate a response. GNG procedures are more sensitive than CRT in the investigation of redundancy effects.     

What makes targets redundant?

Two letter-classification experiments that investigated target-redundancy effects on reaction time (RT) were conducted. Both experiments were replicated with choice reaction time (CRT) and go/no-go (GNG) procedures. In each experiment, there were two single-target conditions, one with a noise letter and one without. In one experiment, the letter classes were two letters that could be of either case. In the second experiment, each class consisted of two different capital letters. In both experiments, there were two redundant-targets conditions, one with identical targets and one with the different members of a class. In both of the GNG experiments, redundancy gains were obtained comparing the different-targets condition with the no-noise, single-target condition. Redundant stimuli are ones that lead to the same response. Visually different stimuli may be processed in parallel and jointly activate a response. GNG procedures are more sensitive than CRT in the investigation of redundancy effects.     

What makes delusions pathological?

Bortolotti argues that we cannot distinguish delusions from other irrational beliefs in virtue of their epistemic features alone. Although her arguments are convincing, her analysis leaves an important question unanswered: What makes delusions pathological? In this paper I set out to answer this question by arguing that the pathological character of delusions arises from an executive dysfunction in a subject’s ability to detect relevance in the environment. I further suggest that this dysfunction derives from an underlying emotional imbalance—one that leads delusional subjects to regard some contextual elements as deeply puzzling or highly significant.     

What makes people happy? Decoupling the experiential-material continuum

Extant literature suggests that consumers derive more happiness from experiences (e.g., vacations) than from material possessions (e.g., furniture). However, this literature typically pits material against experiential consumption, treating them as a single bipolar construct of their relative dominance: more material or more experiential. This focus on relative dominance leaves unanswered questions regarding how different levels of material and experiential qualities each contribute to happiness. Four preregistered studies (N = 3,288), using hundreds of product categories, measured levels of material and experiential qualities using two unipolar items. These studies investigate recalled, evoked, and anticipated happiness. Results show a more nuanced view of the experiential advantage that is critical for future research and consumer theory: material and experiential qualities both have positive relationships with happiness. Further, there is no inherent trade-off between experiential and material qualities: consumers can enjoy consumption that is high on both (e.g., swimming pools and home improvements).     

What makes words sound similar?

Although similarity plays an important role in accounts of language processing, there are surprisingly few direct empirical studies of the phonological similarity between words, and it is therefore not clear whether similarity comparisons between words involve processes similar to those involved in other cognitive domains. In five experiments, participants chose which of two monosyllabic pseudo-words sounded more similar to a target pseudo-word. Our results are generally consistent with the structural alignment theory of comparisons between complex mental representations, suggesting that phonological word similarity parallels similarity involving other kinds of information including visual objects and scenes, events, and word meanings. We use our results to test new metrics of word similarity, and identify predictions for future similarity research both in the domain of word sounds and in other cognitive domains.     

What makes male mice paternal?

Both copulation and postcopulatory cohabitation with pregnant females reduce infanticide and enhance paternal responsiveness in male CS1 mice. The effectiveness of copulation in this process, however, depends on the number of occasions that males have previously encountered infants. Infanticidal males which have been subordinated in brief encounters with other males are less likely to commit infanticide in subsequent tests than are those which became dominant to other males. Males which copulate and cohabit with a relatively large female are less likely to be infanticidal than are those with a relatively small female. These data suggest that males are subordinated after copulation by their mates and that this subordination is a factor in the reduction of infanticide and the initiation of paternal responsiveness.     

What makes a task difficult?

Summary This study explores the relationship between different task requirements and children's task performance and ratings of task difficulty. Four hundred and sixty five children (9 to 13 years old) read texts and answered questions, involving well-defined or ill-defined goals and requiring different thought operations. It was found that rated difficulty and performance were highly related for questions involving a well-defined goal. A simple modus ponens inference was easiest, checking most difficult, and recall of the text ranked in the middle. A question, involving an ill-defined goal was rated to be most difficult, whereas performance was quite high. The results confirm the assumptions that judgment of difficulty relies on two sources of information: 1) perception of goal, and 2) perception of processing effort.     

What makes distributed practice effective?

The advantages provided to memory by the distribution of multiple practice or study opportunities are among the most powerful effects in memory research. In this paper, we critically review the class of theories that presume contextual or encoding variability as the sole basis for the advantages of distributed practice, and recommend an alternative approach based on the idea that some study events remind learners of other study events. Encoding variability theory encounters serious challenges in two important phenomena that we review here: superadditivity and nonmonotonicity. The bottleneck in such theories lies in the assumption that mnemonic benefits arise from the increasing independence, rather than interdependence, of study opportunities. The reminding model accounts for many basic results in the literature on distributed practice, readily handles data that are problematic for encoding variability theories, including superadditivity and nonmonotonicity, and provides a unified theoretical framework for understanding the effects of repetition and the effects of associative relationships on memory.     

What makes placebo-controlled trials unethical?

The leading ethical position on placebo-controlled clinical trials is that whenever proven effective treatment exists for a given condition, it is unethical to test a new treatment for that condition against placebo. Invoking the principle of clinical equipoise, opponents of placebo-controlled trials in the face of proven effective treatment argue that they (1) violate the therapeutic obligation of physicians to offer optimal medical care and (2) lack both scientific and clinical merit. We contend that both of these arguments are mistaken. Clinical equipoise provides erroneous ethical guidance in the case of placebo-controlled trials, because it ignores the ethically relevant distinction between clinical trials and treatment in the context of clinical medicine and the methodological limitations of active-controlled trials. Placebo controls are ethically justifiable when they are supported by sound methodological considerations and their use does not expose research participants to excessive risks of harm.     

What makes depressed people feel worse?

Fifty English-speaking adults were asked in a brief open-ended interview, ‘When you're feeling depressed, what sorts of things can make you feel worse?’ Their responses were subjected to content analysis and frequency counts. The most frequent replies were: being alone (mentioned by 24% of Ss), inactivity (20%) and thinking about the problem that was getting them down (18%). The results are discussed from phenomenological, theoretical, historical, methodological and clinical points of view.     

What makes a categorization task difficult?

To understand why some categorization tasks are more difficult than others, we consider five factors that may affect human performance--namely, covariance complexity, optimal accuracy level with and without internal noise, orientation of the optimal categorization rule, and class separability. We argue that covariance complexity, an information-theoretic measure of complexity, is an excellent predictor of task difficulty. We present an experiment that consists of five conditions using a simulated medical decision-making task In the task human observers view hundreds of hypothetical patient profiles and classify each profile into Disease Category A or B. Each profile is a continuous-valued, three-dimensional stimulus consisting of three vertical bars, where each bar height represents the result of a medical test. Across the five conditions, covariance complexity was systematically manipulated. Results indicate that variation in performance is largely a function of covariance complexity and partly a function of internal noise. The remaining three factors do not explain performance results. We present a challenge to categorization theorists to design models that account for human performance as predicted by covariance complexity.     

The development of category learning strategies: What makes the difference?

Category learning can be achieved by identifying common features among category members, distinctive features among non-members, or both. These processes are psychologically and computationally distinct, and may have implications for the acquisition of categories at different hierarchical levels. The present study examines an account of children’s difficulty in acquiring categories at the subordinate level grounded on these distinct comparison processes. Adults and children performed category learning tasks in which they were exposed either to pairs of objects from the same novel category or pairs of objects from different categories. The objects were designed so that for each category learning task, two features determined category membership whereas two other features were task irrelevant. In the learning stage participants compared pairs of objects noted to be either from the same category or from different categories. Object pairs were chosen so that the objective amount of information provided to the participants was identical in the two learning conditions. We found that when presented only with object pairs noted to be from the same category, young children (6 ? YO ? 9.5) learned the novel categories just as well as older children (10 ? YO ? 14) and adults. However, when presented only with object pairs known to be from different categories, unlike older children and adults, young children failed to learn the novel categories. We discuss cognitive and computational factors that may give rise to this comparison bias, as well as its expected outcomes.     

What makes us busy? Predictors of perceived busyness across the adult lifespan

Busier people tend to perform better on cognitive tasks than less busy individuals. Nevertheless, the characteristics that are associated with greater perceived busyness are unknown. To address this question participants (N?=?463) from the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study (ages 20–89) completed a self-report busyness assessment and demographic, health, personality, and lifestyle measures. Results revealed that perceived busyness peaked in 30-year-olds, showed age-related decreases until age 60, and then remained stable. Moreover, women generally reported being busier than men. Analysis of age by gender interactions revealed that men exhibited a significant cubic age effect for busyness, whereas women did not. Overall, younger age, female gender, agreeableness, neuroticism, frequent participation in novel activities, and enjoyment of cognitive processing were independently associated with being busier, and the characteristics related to busyness were generally stable across age. Notably, participation in novel activities and need for cognition were the most predictive lifestyle characteristics, supporting the framing of busyness as an indicator of mental engagement. We also propose personality-based sources of self-generated and other-generated busyness.     

What makes a word so attractive? Disclosing the urge to read while bisecting

Expert readers have been repeatedly reported to misperceive the centre of visual stimuli, shifting systematically to the left the bisection of any lines (pseudoneglect) while showing a cross-over effect while bisecting different types of orthographic strings (Arduino et al., 2010, Neuropsychologia, 48, 2140). This difference has been attributed to asymmetrical allocation of attention that visuo-verbal material receives when lexical access occurs (e.g., Fischer, 2004, Cognitive Brain Research, 4, 163). The aim of this study was to further examine which visual features guide recognition of potentially orthographic materials. To disentangle the role of orthography, heterogeneity, and visuo-perceptual discreteness, we presented Italian unimpaired adults with four experiments exploiting the bisection paradigm. The results showed that a cross-over effect emerges in most discrete strings, especially when their internal structure, that is being composed of heterogeneous elements, is suggestive of orthographically relevant material. Interestingly, the cross-over effect systematically characterized the processing of letter strings (Experiment 2) and words (Experiments 3 and 4), whether visually discrete or not. Overall, this pattern of results suggests that neither discreteness nor heterogeneity per se are responsible for activating visual scanning mechanisms implied in text exploration, although both contribute to increasing the chance of a visual stimulus undergoing a perceptual analysis dedicated to pre-lexical processing.     

What makes revenge sweet: Seeing the offender suffer or delivering a message?

The present article investigates the conditions under which vengeful episodes are satisfactory for the victim/avenger. Two hypotheses are tested simultaneously: (1) victims are satisfied if they see the offender suffer, even if this suffering was imposed by fate (“comparative suffering” hypothesis) and (2) victims are satisfied if the offender signals that he understands why revenge was imposed upon him (“understanding” hypothesis). A laboratory experiment is described in which the source of the offender’s suffering (revenge vs. fate) and the offender’s understanding for the cause of his suffering were varied. As an implicit measure of goal fulfillment, participants completed a lexical decision task that measured the relative accessibility of aggression-related words (compared to non-aggressive words). The results corroborate the understanding hypothesis: Participants showed higher levels of implicit goal fulfillment if they decided to take revenge and if the offender signaled understanding for the vengeful response. The findings are discussed with regard to the question what people hope to achieve when they take revenge.     

What makes a saint? A Lincoln case study in the communion of the local and the universal Church

Within the curtilage of Lincoln Cathedral lie buried the remains of three very different people to whom sainthood has been attributed: Saint Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln (d.1200); 'Little Saint Hugh' (d.1255), a child maliciously alleged to have been murdered by the local Jewish community; and Edward King (d.1910), Anglican Bishop of Lincoln. Hugh is a saint of the Catholic Church, commemorated by Catholics and Anglicans; 'Little Saint Hugh' was for a short while acclaimed by local people as a saint but never officially recognised as one; Edward King is commemorated by Anglicans but not formally recognised as a saint. The marked difference of approach to the attribution of sainthood between local Christians and Catholic Church authorities, as well as between Catholics and Anglicans, is illustrated by this case study, which raises important ecumenical questions: 'What makes a saint?’, ‘How are non-Catholics to regard the Roman Catholic procedure for beatification and canonisation?’, ‘To what extent can there be fully ecumenical calendars of local saints?’, ‘Does beatification offer a way forward by which Catholics may recognise the holiness of non-Catholic Christians?’     

What makes depressed people feel worse? A cross-cultural replication

Fifty non-patient Spanish adults in Valencia were asked in open-ended interviews, “when you're feeling depressed, what sort of things can make you feel worse?” Their responses were content analysed and compared to the similar data reported by Rippere (1980) for British subjects. As hypothesized, the English-speaking subjects showed a higher ratio of consensual to non-consensual items. They also produced more responses. Qualitative analysis of the two pools of items showed both characteristic similarities and differences. A corpus of situations which appear to make depressed people feel worse is derived from the items common to the Spanish and British data.     

What makes the windows task difficult for young children: rule inference or rule use?

The windows task is difficult for young children. In this task, a child is shown two boxes with windows revealing that one is empty, whereas the other contains a treat. The child is asked to point to a box for an opponent to look in. The child then "wins" the contents of the other box (the treat). To pass the task, the child must use a rule such as "point to the empty box." But crucially, because the child is not told this rule by the experimenter, he or she must first infer it. Therefore, the windows task has two distinct requirements: (a) infer the rule "point to the empty box" and, once the rule is inferred, (b) use the rule by holding it in mind while inhibiting the prepotent response of pointing to the treat. In this study, the authors sought to determine which of these two requirements was responsible for poor performance on the windows task. They compared the performance of 3(1/2)-year-olds (N=40) on four tasks: the standard windows task, a version of the windows task that required rule use but not rule inference, and two versions of the day-night task that also required rule use but not rule inference. The relative performance on these four tasks and the pattern of correlations among them suggested that children had difficulty in inferring a rule that enables them to pass the task, whereas they had little difficulty in using the rule. Little evidence was obtained to suggest that the standard windows task requires inhibition.