T1 difficulty affects the AB: manipulating T1 word frequency and T1 orthographic neighbor frequency

Colored target words were presented with distractor nonwords in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. In Experiment 1, the attentional blink (AB) effect on T2 accuracy was larger when T1 was a difficult (low-frequency) word than when it was a high-frequency word. In Experiment 2 the effect of T1 frequency on the AB was replicated in a between-participants design, and the frequency of T1’s one-letter different neighbors (e.g., case, bare, for care) interacted with T1 frequency in its effects on T2 accuracy. Experiment 3 confirmed the effect of T1 frequency over 6 T1-T2 lags. The effects of T1 characteristics were sensitively assessed in the AB and were more consistent with resource depletion theories than control-process accounts.     

Tarski on the Necessity Reading of Convention T

Tarski’s Convention T is often taken to claim that it is both sufficient and necessary for adequacy in a definition of truth that it imply instances of the T-schema where the embedded sentence translates the mentioned sentence. However, arguments against the necessity claim have recently appeared, and, furthermore, the necessity claim is actually not required for the indefinability results for which Tarski is justly famous; indeed, Tarski’s own presentation of the results in the later Undecidable Theories makes no mention of an assumption to the effect that the definition of truth implies the biconditionals. This raises a question: was Tarski in fact committed to the necessity claim in the important papers of the 1930s and 40s? I argue that he was not. The discussion of this apparently esoteric interpretive issue in fact gets to the heart of many important questions about truth, and in the final sections of the paper I discuss the importance of the T-biconditionals in the theory of meaning and the relation of deflationary and inflationary theories of truth to the semantic paradoxes.     

Type T personality and the Jungian classification system

The Type T personality has been described as a personality dimension referring to individual differences in stimulation seeking, excitement seeking, thrill seeking, arousal seeking, and risk taking. This article explores its relationship to the theoretically relevant personality classification system of C.G. Jung, employing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a measure of Jungian types. A sample of high-school students was administered the Myers-Briggs and a measure of Type T. Pearson correlations revealed Type T to be significantly related to the Jungian Intuitive and Perceptive types, with the Type T personality being described as intuitive and perceptive. Interpretations of these exploratory findings were offered.     

Modal Dispositionalism and the (T) Axiom

Philosophia - Yates has recently argued that modal dispositionalism invalidates the (T) axiom. Both Yates and Allen have advanced responses to the objection: Yates’s response proposes...     

Type T Personality and the Jungian Classification System

The Type T personality has been described as a personality dimension referring to individual differences in stimulation seeking, excitement seeking, thrill seeking, arousal seeking, and risk taking. This article explores its relationship to the theoretically relevant personality classification system of C. G. Jung, employing the Myers-Briggs Type indicator as a measure of Jungian types. A sample of high-school students was administered the Myers-Briggs and a measure of Type T. Pearson correlations revealed Type T to be significantly related to the Jungian Intuitive and Perceptive types, with the Type T personality being described as intuitive and perceptive. Interpretations of these exploratory findings were offered.     

The attentional blink is not affected by backward masking of T2, T2-mask SOA, or level of T2 impoverishment

Identification of the second of two targets (T2) is impaired when presented shortly after the first (T1). This attentional blink (AB) is thought to arise from a delay in T2 processing during which T2 is vulnerable to masking. Conventional studies have measured T2 accuracy which is constrained by the 100% ceiling. We avoided this problem by using a dynamic threshold-tracking procedure that is inherently free from ceiling constraints. In two experiments we examined how AB magnitude is affected by three masking-related factors: (a) presence/absence of T2 mask, (b) T2-mask stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and (c) level of T2 impoverishment (signal-to-noise ratio [SNR]). In Experiment 1, overall accuracy decreased with T2-mask SOA. The magnitude of the AB, however, was invariant with SOA and with mask presence/absence. Experiment 2 further showed that the AB was invariant with T2 SNR. The relationship among mask presence/absence, SOA, and T2 SNR and the AB is encompassed in a qualitative model.     

Responding to N.T. Wright's Rejection of the Soul

At a 2011 meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers, N. T. Wright offered four reasons for rejecting the existence of soul. This was surprising, as many Christian philosophers had previously taken Wright's defense of a disembodied intermediate state as a defense of a substance dualist view of the soul. In this paper, I offer responses to each of Wright's objections, demonstrating that Wright's arguments fail to undermine substance dualism. In so doing, I expose how popular arguments against dualism fail, such as (1) dualism is merely an unwarranted influence of Greek culture on Christianity, and (2) substance dualism is merely a soul‐of‐the‐gaps hypothesis. Moreover, I demonstrate that Wright himself has offered a powerful reason for adopting substance dualism in his previous works. In conclusion I offer a view that explains why the human soul needs a resurrected body.     

Data-limited manipulations of T1 difficulty modulate the attentional blink.

When two targets are embedded in a temporal stream of distractors, second-target identification is initially impaired and then gradually improves as intertarget interval lengthens (attentional blink; AB). According to bottleneck models of the AB, difficulty of first-target processing should modulate the magnitude of the second-target deficit. To test this, we examined whether a data-limited manipulation of T1 difficulty (forward masking) would modulate AB magnitude. In two experiments, we show that data-limited manipulations of T1 difficulty do affect the AB, so long as T1 is not masked by an immediately trailing distractor. When such a trailing item is present, the relationship between T1 difficulty and the AB disappears.     

Depressive rumination and the C957T polymorphism of the DRD2 gene

Depressed individuals who ruminate have difficulties learning from punishment and suppressing task-irrelevant information. The C957T polymorphism of the DRD2 gene, which affects functioning of D2 dopamine receptors (DRD2) that are expressed predominantly in the indirect pathway of the basal ganglia, has been found to influence suppression and punishment learning. Given these associations, we examined in the present study whether depressive rumination is related to the C957T polymorphism in 317 clinically depressed individuals and 317 never-depressed control individuals. A 2 × 2 (diagnostic group ×C957T polymorphism) analysis of variance conducted on depressive rumination scores yielded a significant interaction of group and C957T: Individuals with two 957C alleles reported higher levels of depressive rumination than did individuals with one or two 957T alleles if they were depressed, but not if they were healthy. The present findings suggest that the dopaminergic system and DRD2 are related to the frequency of maladaptive rumination in depressed individuals. Thus, DRD2 may be an important target for the pharmacological treatment of depressive rumination.