Context,goal, utility,and relevance: A reply to Evans (2002) considering Oaksford (2002)

Yama (2001) argued that the matching bias effect was an amalgam of a genuine matching effect and a set size effect. However, Evans (2002) pointed out some problems with Yama's argument. One was on the matching index used in Yama (2001). The others concerned a gap between Yama's (2001) interpretation of matching bias and Evans' (1998) recent discussions that had placed emphasis on the problem of implicit negation. I reply to these claims taking Oaksford (2002) into consideration. Further, I propose a framework connecting context, goal, utility, and relevance, and including a hierarchical structure of goals. I argue that theories of reasoning can be developed and extended with the framework.     

Theories of reasoning and the representational level: A reply to Oaksford

Oaksford (2001) considers that the findings of Espino, Santamaría, and García Madruga (2000a) could be explained by the Probability Heuristics Model (PHM) proposed by Chater and Oaksford (1999). He specifically voices three objections, the two main ones being based on the fact that PHM is not a theory about syllogism representation. If this is the case, we consider that PHM cannot explain our data, because most of them were registered before the participants evaluated the conclusion. We argue that only a theory at the representational level can property explain these data.     

Cultural psychology, A new look: reply to Bond (2002), Fiske (2002), Kitayama (2002), and Miller (2002)

M. H. Bond (2002), A. P. Fiske (2002), S. Kitayama (2002), and J. G. Miller (2002) joined D. Oyserman, H. M. Coon, and M. Kemmelmeier (2002) in highlighting limitations of the individualism-collectivism model of culture. Concern is warranted; nevertheless, individualism-collectivism helps structure discourse on the influence of culture on the mind. To avoid level-of-analysis entanglements, Oyserman et al. propose an integrative model that includes distal, proximal, and situated cultural features of societies and internalized models of these features, highlights the importance of subjective construal, and uses evolutionary perspectives to clarify the basic problems cultures address. Framed this way, it is clear that, depending on situational requirements, both individualism- and collectivism-focused strategies are adaptive; thus, it is likely that human minds have adapted to think both ways.     

Negative priming and stimulus repetition: A reply to Neill and Joordens (2002)

Negative priming is reliably obtained with repeated items, but not with novel items. Here, we review why these stimulus repetition effects raise problems for memorybased theories of negative priming. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence casting doubt on Neill and Joordens’s (2002) claim that perceptual facilitation masks the effects of episodic retrieval with novel items. Finally, we discuss several theoretical and methodological issues raised in the reply by Neill and Joordens. We conclude that a more straightforward interpretation of these stimulus repetition effects is one based on activation-sensitive inhibition.     

Reaching a Decision: A Reply to Oaksford

In his commentary, Oaksford makes two main claims: (1) that the externalisation method used by Green, Over, and Pyne (1997) enforces the correlation observed between probability estimates and selection, and (2) that these estimates support the prediction of a downward revision of P(p) when P(p) > P(q). In this reply, we rebut claim 1 by describing the instructions more comprehensively, and claim 2 by reiterating the importance of making certain theoretical distinctions which Oaksford does not make. Our interest is the psychological process of reaching decision: externalisation methods provide a means of exploring this process and of assessing the value of Bayesian approaches.     

Deciding about decision models of remember and know judgments: a reply to Murdock (2006)

B. B. Murdock (2006) has interpreted remember-know data within a decision space defined by item and associative information, the fundamental variables in his general recognition memory model TODAM (B. B. Murdock, 1982). He has related parameters of this extended model to stimulus characteristics for several classic remember-know data sets. The authors show that this accomplishment is shared by both one- and two-dimensional signal-detection-based remember-know models (J. C. Dunn, 2004; C. M. Rotello, N. A. Macmillan, & J. A. Reeder, 2004; J. T. Wixted & V. Stretch, 2004), which can be represented in this same decision space and can be related to stimulus characteristics with similar success. Murdock claims that his model, unlike its competitors, is a process model; however, the process aspects of TODAM are not used in his application, and the decision aspects are identical to a previously proposed model. Murdock's claim that one competing model (STREAK; C. M. Rotello et al., 2004) is not fully specified is shown to be false. The new model is not superior to existing ones, but comparisons among the models to date are not definitive. The authors describe several strategies that might be applied to distinguish among them.     

Wethinks the author doth protest too much: a reply to Esterson (2002)

A Esterson (2002) responded to the authors' analysis of recent reformulations of Freud's seduction theory and alleged sexual abuse discoveries. Esterson gave several additional examples of the same type of problematic writing the authors discussed in their original article. His commentary is largely a repetition of several already-published arguments, and his numerous criticisms of the article are, in the authors' opinion, without merit. The authors address confusion over inferring abuse from symptoms, treatment of symptoms versus resolution of cases, and fathers as perpetrators of abuse. It is clear that, as long as the topic of child sexual abuse elicits heated debate, so will Freud's seduction theory, but there may be times when one needs to step back to allow a debate to move forward.     

The interaction between time and number in a temporal bisection task: a reply to Vicario (2011)

Abstract. We discuss the results of Vicario (2011, Perception 40 23-29), in the light of an experiment designed to bypass some of the limits of that study. There, participants were asked to perform a temporal bisection on numerical stimuli (small or large digits) presented either for 700/900 ms or 2000/2200 ms. For the two longest durations only, bisections of larger digits occurred later than those of smaller digits. Here, subjects judged the temporal position of a flick occurring during the visual presentation of a digit (1, 5, or 9) which lasted on the screen for either 700 ms or 2000 ms. Results revealed no difference in the perceived temporal midpoints of large compared to small digits. In contrast, they showed a response bias: only with the shortest-duration stimuli the digit's magnitude affected the subject's response.     

Logical reasoning and probabilities: A comprehensive test of Oaksford and Chater (2001)

We report two experiments testing a central prediction of the probabilistic account of reasoning provided by Oaksford and Chater (2001): Acceptance of standard conditional inferences, card choices in the Wason selection task, and quantifiers chosen for conclusions from syllogisms should vary as a function of the frequency of the concepts involved. Frequency was manipulated by a probability-learning phase preceding the reasoning tasks to simulate natural sampling. The effects predicted by Oaksford and Chater (2001) were not obtained with any of the three paradigms.     

The distinction between intuition and guessing in the SRT task generation: A reply to Norman and Price

We (Fu, Dienes, & Fu, 2010) investigated the extent to which people could generate sequences of responses based on knowledge acquired from the Serial Reaction Time task, depending on whether it felt subjectively like the response was based on pure guessing, intuition, conscious rules or memories. Norman and Price (2010) argued that in the context of our task, intuition responses were the same as guessing responses. In reply, we argue that not only do subjects apparently claim to be experiencing different phenomenologies when saying intuition versus guess, but also intuition and guess responses are associated with different behaviors. We found that people could control the knowledge when generating responses felt to be based on intuition but not those felt to be pure guessing. We present further evidence here that triplets associated with intuition but not guessing were also processed fluently.     

Deciding where to attend: priming of pop-out drives target selection

With attention and eye-movements humans orient to targets of interest. This orienting occurs faster when the same target repeats: priming of pop-out (PoP). While reaction times (RTs) can be important, PoP's real function could be to steer where to orient, a possibility underexposed in many current paradigms, as these predesignate a target to which to orient. In a novel procedure we intermixed pop-out trials (one oddball target, two identical distractors) with choice trials (one item of each kind) where observers freely chose an item to attend to. Pop-out trials strongly drove subsequent choice: observers typically chose the preceding target. Conversely, choice trials affected subsequent pop-out RTs. Conventional PoP measures correlated positively with our choice measures among observers, suggesting common mechanisms. Our results support PoP accounts centered on altered target priority, and underscore PoP's importance for visual exploration.     

Autonomic and eyeblink conditioning are closely related to contingency awareness: reply to Wiens and Ohman (2002) and Manns et al. (2002)

S. Wiens and A. Ohman (2002) disputed the conclusion that Pavlovian conditioning is strongly related to contingency awareness (P. F. Lovibond & D. R. Shanks, 2002) on the basis that an inappropriate definition of awareness was used. J. R. Manns, R. E. Clark, and L. R. Squire (2002) contended that delay eyeblink conditioning is independent of awareness. The authors of the present article consider these arguments, highlight several problems in the new studies described by the commentators, and conclude that there is still little evidence for unconscious conditioning in either subliminal autonomic conditioning or eyeblink conditioning. The most parsimonious account of existing data is that a single learning process gives rise to both awareness and conditioned responding. Further progress in evaluating the possibility of unconscious conditioning would be facilitated by the development of more completely specified and testable dual-process models.     

Jealousy reconsidered: A reply to DeSteno (2010)

In a recent commentary, DeSteno (2010) critiqued the work of Levy and Kelley (2010) which investigated the relationship of attachment style to the sex difference in jealousy. This commentary addresses the concerns raised by DeSteno; I briefly review some of the literature that was not addressed by DeSteno's commentary and discuss directions that future research may take.     

Post hoc versus predictive accounts of children’s theory of mind: A reply to Ruffman

Ruffman (2014) argues for a minimalist account of infants’ performance on theory of mind tasks. This commentary argues that because Ruffman’s minimalist account is post hoc, it neither generates testable predictions about how infants will respond in new situations, nor does it offer a coherent explanation for existing false-belief findings. An alternative, mentalist account is presented. This account integrates infancy findings with prior theory of mind literature and generates novel predictions about children’s false belief performance.     

Sequential dependencies in the Eriksen flanker task: A direct comparison of two competing accounts

In the conflict/control loop theory proposed by Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, and Cohen (2001), conflict monitored in a trial leads to an increase in cognitive control on the subsequent trial. The critical data pattern supporting this assertion is the so-called Gratton effect—the decrease in flanker interference following incongruent trials—which was initially observed in the Eriksen flanker task. Recently, however, the validity of the idea that this pattern supports a general conflict/control mechanism has been questioned on the grounds that the Gratton effect is only observed with stimulus repetition. We present an experiment testing whether the Gratton effect reflects a stimulus-independent increase in cognitive control or stimulus-specific repetition priming. Although our results support the latter hypothesis, the priming effect is modulated by the congruency of the previous trial. We discuss a new mechanism through which monitored conflict is used to exert executive control by modulating stimulus-response associations.     

Ease of predication does not account for imageability effects in performance: a reply to Jones (2002)

In this paper we defend our views against claim that the criticism of the ease of predication hypothesis (Jones, 1985) made by de Mornay Davies and Funnell (2000) is "fundamentally flawed." Jones raises five issues concerning the content of the text, the reliability of effects of ease of predication, the generation of predicates, semantic features, and memory retrieval. We address each of these issues in turn and show that either a critical point raised is not made, or the point is mistaken. More importantly we show that our empirical findings, which are entirely overlooked by Jones, unequivocally support the view that ease of predication does not account for imageability effects in performance.     

Effects of task factors on selection by color in the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task

In five experiments, we examined task factors influencing selection by color in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. Participants were required to respond to the presence or case of a target letter presented within an RSVP sequence, and they were cued as to the color in which that target was most likely to occur. The first two experiments explored the effect of task difficulty. It was found that a change from the discrimination of upper- versus lowercase targets to the detection of an exact shape had no influence on the color-cuing effect. In contrast, increasing letter set discriminability and decreasing color discriminability reduced the color-cuing effect considerably, although they did not eliminate it. In the third and fourth experiments, the frequency of valid trials was reduced, removing the incentive to use the color information. Again, a small benefit remained, indicating partially automatic and strategic color-processing components. Finally, the fifth experiment showed that an increase in perceptual load had no influence on the color-cuing effect. Together, these five experiments provide further evidence of the robustness of direct selection by color.