源于“反常”终于“常理”的禀赋效应

如果忽略收入影响和交易成本, 愿意为一样物品支付的价格应等于愿意出售的价格。而塞勒教授却发现, 现实生活中有一些“反常”现象, 个体会对自己所拥有的物品赋予更高的价值, 造成“愿意支付价格”和“愿意出售价格”的不一致。塞勒利用预期理论中的损失厌恶对这些反常现象进行解释, 并将该现象称为禀赋效应(endowment effect)。此后, 众多研究者从不同角度对该效应进行了探索和论证。文章详细梳理了禀赋效应的多种解释机制, 包括损失厌恶、心理所有权理论、偏差的认知过程以及进化的观点等, 论证了禀赋效应符合“常理”的原因, 同时也探讨了禀赋效应在商业销售策略和政府拆迁政策等方面的应用前景。     

The right hemisphere as an anomaly detector: evidence from visual perception

V. S. Ramachandran (1998) has suggested that the right hemisphere, which tends to be specialized for the analysis of global-level information, serves as an anomaly detector. Its role is to judge whether a given percept is possible and whether there are elements of that percept that seem incongruent with the other elements. In contrast, the left hemisphere tends to create a "story" to make sense of the incongruities. In the current study, pictures of possible or impossible objects were displayed for brief exposure durations to either the left visual field/right hemisphere or to the right visual field/left hemisphere). The results provide tentative support for the work of Ramachandran. In male participants, the right hemisphere was superior to the left in detecting impossible objects.     

Magidor on anomaly and truth-value gaps

In Category Mistakes, Ofra Magidor provides two arguments against the view that category mistakes express propositions that are not truth-evaluable at some world. I argue that her first, Williamsonian argument against this view begs the question, and that her second argument rests on a misleading conception of how semantic defect results in infelicity judgments. I conclude by conceding that she is still correct to stress that the view she opposes face noteworthy foundational and empirical challenges.     

Right-posterior face processing anomaly in depression

Evidence of a right-posterior brain anomaly was found in a study of 19 individuals with major depression and 15 controls. Participants performed a recognition-memory task involving positive, neutral, and negative face and word stimuli. Scalp brain wave topography suggested a region-specific anomaly in the depressed group. Individuals with major depression demonstrated a reduction in the N200 component of the event-related brain potential to faces and not words. Furthermore, results indicate that the regional anomaly is specific to positive facial stimuli. Findings are interpreted in light of a model of regional brain specialization in emotion and psychopathology.     

The resolution and recovery of filler-gap dependencies in aphasia: evidence from on-line anomaly detection

This study examines the on-line processing of sentences with movement using an auditory anomaly detection task (after Borland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995). Eight agrammatic aphasic participants (four of whom had undergone treatment focused on comprehension and production of filler-gap sentences) and 24 young normal participants listened to sentences and pressed a button when the sentences "stopped making sense." Critical sentences contained an anomaly in object relative clauses or conjoined clauses. Results showed that both young normals and aphasic participants were able to reject anomalous sentences of both types. In addition, both groups showed evidence of filler-gap resolution on-line. Importantly, however, there was evidence of a treatment effect for the aphasic patients: those who received treatment showed better performance than those who had not. Treated patients were more successful than the untreated patients in detecting the anomaly in filler-gap conditions, rejecting the anomalous filler-gap sentences reliably more often than the non-anomalous ones, like the young normals. This effect was not noted for untreated participants, i.e., there was no statistical difference between their rejection of anomalous and non-anomalous filler gap sentences. Further, the reaction time data showed that the treated aphasic patients' rejections came before sentence's end (within 2000 ms), while the majority of responses made by untreated patients did not. These results indicate that individuals with agrammatic aphasia appear to retain some gap-filling capacity and that treatment can improve their ability to make use of this capacity.     

The dental anomaly: how and why dental caries and periodontitis are phenomenologically atypical

Use of humanities content in American medical education has been debated for well over 60 years. While many respected scholars and medical educators have purported the value of humanities content in medical training, its inclusion remains unstandardized, and the undergraduate medical curriculum continues to be focused on scientific and technical content. Cited barriers to the integration of humanities include time and space in an already overburdened curriculum, and a lack of consensus on the exact content, pedagogy and instruction. Edmund Pellegrino, physician and scholar of the latter twentieth century, spent much of his professional life promoting the value and importance of the humanities in medical education, seeking the best way to incorporate and teach this content in clinically relevant ways. His efforts included the founding of multiple enterprises starting in the 1960s and 1970s to promote human values in medical education, including the Society for Health and Human Values and its Institute on Human Values in Medicine. Regardless of his efforts and those of many others into the current century, the medical humanities remains a curricular orphan, unable to find a lasting home in medical education and training.     

Tasks and timing in the perception of linguistic anomaly

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the relative timing of syntactic and pragmatic anomaly detection during sentence processing. Experiment 1 was an eye movement study. Experiment 2 employed a dual-task paradigm with compressed speech input, to put the processing routines under time pressure. Experiment 3 used compressed speech input in an anomaly monitoring task. The outcomes of these experiments suggest that there is little or no delay in pragmatic processing relative to syntactic processing in the comprehension of unambiguous sentences. This narrows the possible explanations for any delays that are observed in the use of pragmatic information for ambiguity resolution.The research reported in this paper was supported by Program Project Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories from the National Institutes of Child and Human Development, and in part by a grant to Stephen Crain and Donald Shankweiler from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. We thank Jacques Mehler and Gerry Altmann for helpful information about speech compression algorithms. We are especially grateful to Ignatius Mattingly for his generous expert advice on speech compression and design of the experimental materials, and also for recording all the speech stimuli. Julie Boland, Brian McElree, Janet Nicol, and Martin Pickering provided very helpful advice on an earlier draft.     

The Ouchi illusion: An anomaly in the perception of rigid motion for limited spatial frequencies and angles

The spatial parameters underlying a novel illusion of relative motion are characterized. A simple stimulus composed of two sine-wave gratings was sufficient to generate the illusion. We measured the response of subjects to rapid, small-amplitude oscillations of this stimulus behind a fixation point. The effect was clearly strongest for acute angles between the gratings, but only when spatial frequency was between 6 and 11 cpd. We surmise that activity in the grating cells of the primate visual cortex (von der Heydt, Peterhans, & Dursteler, 1992) might be the cause of the illusion. The illusion is potentially an important tool in understanding how higher cortical areas combine disparate motion signals.     

Children's detection and awareness of textual anomaly

Children of 8 and 11 years were assessed in two experiments for their sensitivity to textual anomaly. In Experiment 1, subjects read stories containing two target lines, one appropriate and the other anomalous in relation to previously given information. Both age groups read the anomalous line more slowly than the appropriate line, but in a subsequent test of comprehension monitoring, the older group was more likely than the younger group to pick out the anomalous line as not fitting in with the rest of the story. Experiment 2 produced similar results: both 8- and 11-year-old children read an anomalous line more slowly, but 11-year-olds were more likely than 8-year-olds to cite the anomalous line or part of it when questioned about the possible presence of a line that did not fit in with the rest of the story. The results indicate that an age change in comprehension monitoring as indexed by citation or selection of a textual anomaly need not be contingent upon a parallel age change in constructive processing as indexed by modulation of reading rate.     

Low-temperature damping anomaly in an yttria-stabilized tetragonal zirconia polycrystal

Dilational and shear internal friction and four elastic parameters (Young's modulus, the shear modulus, the bulk modulus and the Lame parameter) have been cyclically measured between 68 and 400K in an yttria-stabilized tetragonal zirconia polycrystal ((Y)TZP), using an ultrasonic pulse wave of frequency 3.8MHz. A 200K peak in the shear friction, which was observed in repeated cooling runs, decreases with increasing repetition number, suggesting a martensitic-like transition due to short-range cooperative movement of oxygen ions in the (Y)TZP lattice.     

A case study of anomaly detection: Shallow semantic processing and cohesion establishment

Although the establishment of a coherent mental representation depends on semantic analysis, such analysis is not necessarily complete. This is illustrated by failures to notice the anomaly in questions such as, “When an airplane crashes, where should the survivors be buried?” Four experiments were carried out to extend knowledge of what determines the incidental detection of the critical item. Detection is a function of the goodness of global fit of the item (Experiments 1 and 2) and the extent to which the scenario predicts the item (Experiment 3). Global good fit appears to result in shallow processing of details. In Experiment 4, it is shown that if satisfactory coherence can be established without detailed semantic analysis, through the recruitment of suitable information from a sentence, then processing is indeed shallow. The studies also show that a text is not understood by first producing a local semantic representation and then incorporating this into a global model, and that semantic processing is not strictly incremental.     

Four strategies for dealing with the counting anomaly in spontaneous collapse theories of quantum mechanics

A few years ago, I argued that according to spontaneous collapse theories of quantum mechanics, arithmetic applies to macroscopic objects only as an approximation. Several authors have written articles defending spontaneous collapse theories against this charge, including Bassi and Ghirardi, Clifton and Monton, and now Frigg. The arguments of these authors are all different and all ingenious, but in the end I think that none of them succeeds, for reasons I elaborate here. I suggest a fourth line of response, based on an analogy with epistemic paradoxes, which I think is the best way to defend spontaneous collapse theories, and which leaves my main thesis intact.     

Children's and adults' processing of anomaly and implausibility during reading: evidence from eye movements

The eye movements of 24 children and 24 adults were monitored to compare how they read sentences containing plausible, implausible, and anomalous thematic relations. In the implausible condition the incongruity occurred due to the incompatibility of two objects involved in the event denoted by the main verb. In the anomalous condition the direct object of the verb was not a possible verb argument. Adults exhibited immediate disruption with the anomalous sentences as compared to the implausible sentences as indexed by longer gaze durations on the target word. Children exhibited the same pattern of effects as adults as far as the anomalous sentences were concerned, but exhibited delayed effects of implausibility. These data indicate that while children and adults are alike in their basic thematic assignment processes during reading, children may be delayed in the efficiency with which they are able to integrate pragmatic and real-world knowledge into their discourse representation.     

On the property structure of realist collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics and the so-called "counting anomaly"

The aim of this article is twofold. Recently, Lewis has presented an argument, now known as the "counting anomaly", that the spontaneous localization approach to quantum mechanics, suggested by Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber, implies that arithmetic does not apply to ordinary macroscopic objects. I will take this argument as the starting point for a discussion of the property structure of realist collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics in general. At the end of this I present a proof of the fact that the composition principle, which holds true in standard quantum mechanics, fails in all realist collapse interpretations. On the basis of this result I reconsider the counting anomaly and show that what lies at the heart of the anomaly is the failure to appreciate the peculiarities of the property structure of such interpretations. Once this flaw is uncovered, the anomaly vanishes.     

Musical experts recruit action-related neural structures in harmonic anomaly detection: Evidence for embodied cognition in expertise

Humans are extremely good at detecting anomalies in sensory input. For example, while listening to a piece of Western-style music, an anomalous key change or an out-of-key pitch is readily apparent, even to the non-musician. In this paper we investigate differences between musical experts and non-experts during musical anomaly detection. Specifically, we analyzed the electroencephalograms (EEG) of five expert cello players and five non-musicians while they listened to excerpts of J.S. Bach’s Prelude from Cello Suite No. 1. All subjects were familiar with the piece, though experts also had extensive experience playing the piece. Subjects were told that anomalous musical events (AMEs) could occur at random within the excerpts of the piece and were told to report the number of AMEs after each excerpt. Furthermore, subjects were instructed to remain still while listening to the excerpts and their lack of movement was verified via visual and EEG monitoring. Experts had significantly better behavioral performance (i.e. correctly reporting AME counts) than non-experts, though both groups had mean accuracies greater than 80%. These group differences were also reflected in the EEG correlates of key-change detection post-stimulus, with experts showing more significant, greater magnitude, longer periods of, and earlier peaks in condition-discriminating EEG activity than novices. Using the timing of the maximum discriminating neural correlates, we performed source reconstruction and compared significant differences between cellists and non-musicians. We found significant differences that included a slightly right lateralized motor and frontal source distribution. The right lateralized motor activation is consistent with the cortical representation of the left hand – i.e. the hand a cellist would use, while playing, to generate the anomalous key-changes. In general, these results suggest that sensory anomalies detected by experts may in fact be partially a result of an embodied cognition, with a model of the action for generating the anomaly playing a role in its detection.     

A challenging intervention with maternal anxiety: Babies requiring surgical correction of a congenital anomaly after missed prenatal diagnosis

The objective of this study is to assess the impact on maternal anxiety of a short‐term intervention in a particularly stressful situation, such as a surgical anomaly diagnosed only at birth after repeated negative prenatal ultrasounds. The patients were 30 mothers of babies requiring surgical correction of a congenital anomaly who were randomly assigned to an intervention (N = 16) or control (N = 14) group. The intervention group received standard care plus short‐term intervention that included weekly meetings with the psychologist and weekly team meetings. The control group received only standard care available on the Neonatal Surgery Unit. The main outcome measure was maternal anxiety levels, assessed at birth and on discharge with the Spielberger State–Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI–S). Statistical comparisons were made, and no significant differences were found at birth in the STAI–S scores of the two groups. At discharge, the intervention group exhibited a much lower STAI–S score than the group without short‐term intervention. The authors concluded that psychological counseling for parents of newborn babies has been shown to be helpful. However, the impact of such assistance was shown to be particularly beneficial for parents facing the emotional stress of their children requiring unexpected surgical corrections of congenital anomalies at birth. Therefore, the presence of a psychologist, as part of the standard care of newborns requiring surgical correction, is recommended. ©2003 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Phonon renormalization,specific-heat anomaly and why some aspects of mean-field theory can be relevant for high-T c superconductivity

Abstract

Phonon anomalies due to superconductivity in YBa₂Cu₃O₇ are correlated with the superconducting order parameter. The phonon part of the excess specific heat follows the same temperature evolution as the measured macroscopic excess heat capacity. The electronic part of the transformation entropy corresponds to about 10% of the total carrier concentration. No excess entropy was found at temperatures well above T_c. The effect of phonon contributions to the stabilization energy of the superconducting phase is discussed.