Generalized others and imaginary audiences: A neo-Meadian approach to adolescent egocentrism

Piaget’s conception of adolescent egocentrism, as interpreted and extended by Elkind (1967) is discussed, and research that has related Elkind’s egocentric ideations of personal fable and imaginary audience to age and intellectual development is considered. Alternative theories of adolescent egocentrism and its decentration are examined, and a neo-Meadian framework is discussed that understands the imaginary audience ideation of adolescents as a possibly functional, highly variable response to the complex task of coordinating individual and social perspectives as part of the adolescent’s search for identity.     

Intersubjectivity and egocentrism: Insights from the relational perspectives of Piaget, Mead, and Wittgenstein

Beginning with Piaget’s concept of egocentrism, we explicate a view of differentiating and coordination perspectives on which language and cognition are based by also drawing on insights from Mead and Wittgenstein. The concept of egocentrism is linked to Piaget’s view of knowledge and development. In overcoming egocentrism, infants differentiate the world from their action. We extend a Piagetian approach to overcoming egocentrism with regard to children’s social knowledge by drawing on Mead’s view that minds and selves emerge from the social process. Children must take the role of others for selves to emerge, a process that is rooted in interaction, requiring sufficient experience with others to be able to anticipate others’ response or attitude to their act. Then the self can respond to one’s own act as the other would. From Piaget’s perspective, these are schemes or patterns of action that develop with repeated experience. From Wittgenstein’s perspective, these patterns are embedded in forms of life; natural ways of reacting to and interacting with others that are characteristic of our species. Overcoming egocentrism or developing perspective taking is required for understanding and for human forms of cognition.     

Functional magnetic resonance imaging study of Piaget's conservation-of-number task in preschool and school-age children: a neo-Piagetian approach

Jean Piaget’s theory is a central reference point in the study of logico-mathematical development in children. One of the most famous Piagetian tasks is number conservation. Failures and successes in this task reveal two fundamental stages in children’s thinking and judgment, shifting at approximately 7 years of age from visuospatial intuition to number conservation. In the current study, preschool children (nonconservers, 5-6 years of age) and school-age children (conservers, 9-10 years of age) were presented with Piaget’s conservation-of-number task and monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The cognitive change allowing children to access conservation was shown to be related to the neural contribution of a bilateral parietofrontal network involved in numerical and executive functions. These fMRI results highlight how the behavioral and cognitive stages Piaget formulated during the 20th century manifest in the brain with age.     

Egocentrism in moral development: Gibbs, Piaget, Kohlberg

In Gibb’s theory of moral development Piagetian ideas concerning egocentrism play an important role. Based on these ideas Gibbs offers a detailed analysis of transitions in moral development. However, Gibbs still fails to utilize the full potential offered by Piaget’s equilibration theory, because he does not generalize the idea of overcoming egocentrism, as an important mechanism, to all stage transitions. Gibbs seeks a non-relativistic theoretical/ethical justification for his claims about moral development in a difficult to substantiate notion of an underlying reality. Moreover, such objectivist claims are difficult to reconcile with his endorsement of Piaget’s constructivism.Following Piaget’s equilibration theory development can be seen as the march to an ever widening perspective, possible through reflecting abstraction, and implying overcoming egocentric biases that recur at all levels of development. Assuming the widest level in the case of moral development is the moral point of view, an impartial procedure that should guarantee that everybody involved can freely agree as the result of considering arguments reflecting all viewpoints, fits in with a tradition in ethics from Kant, to Rawls, to Habermas which takes the moral point of view as the ultimate moral principle. These so called ‘Procedural Ethics’ theories are not relativistic, but not objectivist either, because they ultimately depend on the characteristics of the procedure.     

The COST of explicit memory

Within Piaget there is an implicit theory of the development of explicit memory. It rests in the dynamical trajectory underlying the development of causality, object, space and time – a complex (COST) supporting a symbolic relationship integral to the explicit. Cassirer noted the same dependency in the phenomena of aphasias, insisting that a symbolic function is being undermined in these deficits. This is particularly critical given the reassessment of Piaget’s stages as the natural bifurcations of a self-organizing dynamic system. The elements of a theoretical framework required to support explicit memory are developed, to include, (1) the complex developmental trajectory supporting the emergence of the explicit in Piaget, (2) the concrete dynamical system and the concept of a non-differentiable time contained in Bergson’s theory required to support a conscious, as opposed to an implicit remembrance, (3) the relation to current theories of amnesia, difficulties posed by certain retrograde amnesic phenomena, the role of the hippocampus and limitations of connectionist models, (4) the fact that nowhere in this overall framework does the loss of explicit memory imply or require the destruction of experience “stored in the brain.”     

What are self-generated actions?

The concept of self-generated action is controversial, despite extensive study of its neural basis. Why is this concept so troublesome? We analyse the concept of self-generated action as employed by [Passingham et al., 2010a] and [Passingham et al., 2010b] . There are two definitions of self-generated action; as operant action and as underdetermined action. The latter draws on subjective experience. Experiments on action awareness suggest that experience may not be a good guide for defining self-generated action. Nevertheless, we agree with Passingham and colleagues that self-generated actions exist distinct from operant actions. But defining ‘self-generated’ by the degree of involvement of an endogenous process risks regress. We sketch an alternative account of self-generated action that tries to avoid these problems to make self-generated actions accessible to experimental science.     

Further evidence of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory’s validity problems: A meta-analytic investigation—Response to Miller, Maples, and Campbell (this issue)

Miller, Maples, and Campbell (this issue) present evidence that Rosenthal and Hooley’s (2010) concerns regarding the Narcissistic Personality Inventory’s (NPI) relation to psychological health may be unwarranted. To resolve this issue empirically, we conducted a meta-analysis (k = 54, N = 38,932). Meta-analytic results revealed that a subset of NPI items were indeed problematic; items that function poorly at differentiating narcissists from non-narcissists accounted entirely for the NPI’s connection to psychological health. These items were also strongly associated with self-esteem, but unrelated to aggression/anger. In contrast, the remaining NPI items were unrelated to psychological health, but associated with aggression/anger. We conclude that although the NPI measures narcissism, its poorest functioning items also link it to outcomes unrelated to narcissism.     

The impact of feedback frequency on learning and task performance: Challenging the “more is better” assumption

Previous research on feedback frequency suggests that more frequent feedback improves learning and task performance (Salmoni, Schmidt, & Walter, 1984). Drawing from resource allocation theory (Kanfer & Ackerman, 1989), we challenge the “more is better” assumption and propose that frequent feedback can overwhelm an individual’s cognitive resource capacity, thus reducing task effort and producing an inverted-U relationship with learning and performance over time. We then propose that positive and negative affective states will moderate the inverted-U relationship between feedback frequency and task performance. We test these propositions in an experimental study where the frequency of task feedback is manipulated. Results show that feedback frequency exhibits an inverted-U relationship with task performance, and this relationship is mediated by task effort. This curvilinear relationship is then moderated by individual’s positive affective state.     

Consciousness and modality: on the possible preserved visual consciousness in blindsight subjects

In a recent paper, Brogaard (2011) presents counter-arguments to the conclusions of an experiment with blindsight subject GR. She argues that contrary to the apparent findings that GR’s preserved visual abilities relate to degraded visual experiences, she is in fact fully unconscious of the stimuli she correctly identifies. In this paper, we present arguments and evidence why Brogaard’s argument does not succeed in its purpose. We suggest that not only is relevant empirical evidence in opposition to Brogaard’s argument, her argument misconstrues necessary criteria to decide whether a conscious experience is visual or not visual.     

An integrated perspective on the relation between response speed and intelligence

Research in the field of mental chronometry and individual differences has revealed several robust regularities (Jensen, 2006). These include right-skewed response time (RT) distributions, the worst performance rule, correlations with general intelligence (g) that are more pronounced for RT standard deviations (RTSD) than they are for RT means (RTm), an almost perfect linear relation between individual differences in RTSD and RTm, linear Brinley plots, and stronger correlations between g and inspection time (IT) than between g and RTm. Here we show how all these regularities are manifestations of a single underlying relationship, when viewed through the lens of Ratcliff’s diffusion model ( [Ratcliff, 1978] and [Ratcliff et al., 2008] ). The single underlying relationship is between individual differences in general intelligence and individual differences in “drift rate”, which is just the speed of information processing in Ratcliff’s model. We also test and confirm a strong prediction of the diffusion model, namely that the worst performance rule generalizes to phenomena outside of the field of intelligence. Our approach provides an integrative perspective on intelligence findings.     

Self- and other regulation during the infancy period

The “other regulation” views of Lev Vygotsky and of Jerome Bruner are contrasted with Jean Piaget's self-regulatory model of infant development. Examples of adult behavior in Piaget's writings and in mother-infant interactions suggest that adults perform behaviors which are analogous to Piaget's type a and b self-regulation. Data from infant games are provided to illustrate the processes by which mothers regulate the environments for their infants and the consequences of such maternal regulation for infant development.     

Investigating joint attention mechanisms through spoken human-robot interaction

Referential gaze during situated language production and comprehension is tightly coupled with the unfolding speech stream ( [Griffin, 2001] , [Meyer et al., 1998] and [Tanenhaus et al., 1995] ). In a shared environment, utterance comprehension may further be facilitated when the listener can exploit the speaker’s focus of (visual) attention to anticipate, ground, and disambiguate spoken references. To investigate the dynamics of such gaze-following and its influence on utterance comprehension in a controlled manner, we use a human–robot interaction setting. Specifically, we hypothesize that referential gaze is interpreted as a cue to the speaker’s referential intentions which facilitates or disrupts reference resolution. Moreover, the use of a dynamic and yet extremely controlled gaze cue enables us to shed light on the simultaneous and incremental integration of the unfolding speech and gaze movement.We report evidence from two eye-tracking experiments in which participants saw videos of a robot looking at and describing objects in a scene. The results reveal a quantified benefit-disruption spectrum of gaze on utterance comprehension and, further, show that gaze is used, even during the initial movement phase, to restrict the spatial domain of potential referents. These findings more broadly suggest that people treat artificial agents similar to human agents and, thus, validate such a setting for further explorations of joint attention mechanisms.     

How information guides movement: intercepting curved free kicks in soccer

Previous studies have shown that balls subjected to spin induce large errors in perceptual judgments ( [Craig et al., 2006] and [Craig et al., 2009] ) due to the additional accelerative force that causes the ball’s flight path to deviate from a standard parabolic trajectory. A recent review however, has suggested that the findings from such experiments may be imprecise due to the decoupling of perception and action and the reliance on the ventral system (van der Kamp, Rivas, van Doorn, & Savelsbergh, 2008). The aim of this study was to present the same curved free kick trajectory simulations from the perception only studies ( [Craig et al., 2006] and [Craig et al., 2009] ) but this time allow participants to move to intercept the ball. By using immersive, interactive virtual reality technology participants were asked to control the movement of a virtual effector presented in a virtual soccer stadium so that it would make contact with a virtual soccer ball as it crossed the goal-line. As in the perception only studies the direction of spin had a significant effect on the participants’ responses with significantly fewer balls being intercepted in the spin conditions when compared to no-spin conditions. A significantly higher percentage of movement reversals for the spin conditions served to highlight the link between information specifying ball heading direction and subsequent movement. The coherence of the findings for both the perception and perception/action study are discussed in light of the dual systems model for visual processing.     

Probing the human brain with stimulating electrodes: The story of Roberts Bartholow’s (1874) experiment on Mary Rafferty

Roberts Bartholow’s 1874 experiment on Mary Rafferty is widely cited as the first demonstration, by direct application of stimulating electrodes, of the motor excitability of the human cerebral cortex. The many accounts of the experiment, however, leave certain questions and details unexamined or unresolved, especially about Bartholow’s goals, the nature and quality of the evidence, and the experiment’s role in the history of theory and research on localisation of function. In this article, we try to fill these gaps and to tell the full story. We describe Bartholow’s career up to 1874, review the theoretical and empirical background for the experiment, and present Bartholow’s own account of the experiment as well as those of his supporters and critics. We then present our own analysis, assess the experiment’s influence on contemporaneous scientific opinion about cortical excitability, and trace its citation record into our own time. We also review and assess ethical criticisms of Bartholow and their effects on his career, and we close by discussing the role we think the experiment deserves to play in the history of theory and research on cortical excitability.     

“I Feel Your Pain”: The effects of observing ostracism on the ostracism detection system

Ostracism—being ignored and excluded—is a painful experience with negative psychological consequences. Social psychologists ( [Kerr and Levine, 2008] and [Spoor and Williams, 2007] ) argue humans have an evolved system for automatically detecting cues of ostracism and exclusion. Detection elicits pain and threats to fundamental needs. We hypothesize simply observing ostracism will cause negative affect and need threat in the observer. Participants observed a three-player Cyberball game; a target player was included or ostracized, and participants were either instructed to take the perspective of this player or given no such instructions. Participants observing ostracism reported negative affect and need threat. Our results indicate that ostracism detection is even more powerful than previously suggested, because vicariously, we feel the pain of others’ ostracism as our own.     

Number-knower levels in young children: insights from Bayesian modeling

Lee and Sarnecka (2010) developed a Bayesian model of young children’s behavior on the Give-N test of number knowledge. This paper presents two new extensions of the model, and applies the model to new data. In the first extension, the model is used to evaluate competing theories about the conceptual knowledge underlying children’s behavior. One, the knower-levels theory, is basically a “stage” theory involving real conceptual change. The other, the approximate-meanings theory, assumes that the child’s conceptual knowledge is relatively constant, although performance improves over time. In the second extension, the model is used to ask whether the same latent psychological variable (a child’s number-knower level) can simultaneously account for behavior on two tasks (the Give-N task and the Fast-Cards task) with different performance demands. Together, these two demonstrations show the potential of the Bayesian modeling approach to improve our understanding of the development of human cognition.     

The role of egocentrism and focalism in the emotion intensity bias

People sometimes judge their emotions, preferences, and attitudes to be more intense than those of other people. Two experiments tested whether this emotion intensity bias in direct comparisons results from two non-motivated cognitive processes—egocentrism and focalism. In Study 1, the intensity bias was found even when comparing a friend’s preferences to peers. In Study 2, attention given to own versus other’s preferences, and the referent of the comparison (self or others) were manipulated. Results indicated that attention to others reduced the bias, presumably by reducing egocentrism. Consistent with focalism, the bias also emerged when a friend was the target of comparison, and the bias was eliminated when the self was the referent rather than the target of comparison. In the discussion, we evaluate these accounts in light of some alternative explanations for the intensity bias.     

Dreaming in the multilevel framework

Biological realism ( [Revonsuo, 2001] and [Revonsuo, 2006] ) states that dreaming is a biological phenomenon and therefore explainable in naturalistic terms, similar to the explanation of other biological phenomena. In the biological sciences, the structure of explanations can be described with the help of a framework called ‘multilevel explanation’. The multilevel model provides a context that assists to clarify what needs to be explained and how, and how to place different theories into the same model. Here, I will argue that the multilevel framework would be useful when we try to construct scientific explanations of dreaming.     

Romantic relationship status biases memory of faces of attractive opposite-sex others: evidence from a reverse-correlation paradigm

Previous research has demonstrated that, presumably as a way to protect one’s current romantic relationship, individuals involved in a heterosexual romantic relationship tend to give lower attractiveness ratings to attractive opposite-sex others as compared to uninvolved individuals (i.e., the derogation effect). The present study importantly extends this research by examining whether romantic relationship status actually biases memory for the facial appearance of attractive (vs. unattractive) mates. To address this issue, we used a reverse-correlation technique (Mangini & Biederman, 2004), originally developed to get a visual approximation of an individual’s internal representation of a target category or person. In line with the derogation effect, results demonstrated that romantically involved (vs. uninvolved) individuals indeed held a less attractive memory of a previously encountered attractive mate’s face. Interestingly, they also held a more attractive memory of an unattractive mate’s face as compared to uninvolved individuals. This latter finding may suggest that romantically involved (as compared to uninvolved) individuals differentiate opposite-sex others along the attractiveness dimension less.     

A qualitative model for the dynamics of cognitive processes

A qualitative model is constructed for adaptive processes and, in particular, for Piaget's theory of cognitive development. One of its main features is to describe the threshold period between stages of development. The basic approach is to isolate some general properties of Piaget's theory, and then use Thom's catastrophe theory as the major tool to obtain a geometric representation for a certain aspect of this theory.