The cradle of categorization: Is the basic level basic?

A common assumption in the developmental literature is that the earliest kind of conceptual categories to be formed are basic-level categories. A corollary assumption is that superordinate categories are formed after, and out of, previously acquired basic-level categories. Two experiments using an object-manipulation task explored these assumptions by studying response to a variety of categories in children aged from 12 to 20 months. The first experiment examined responses to basic-level categories (dogs vs. cars),superordinate categories (animals vs. vehicles), and contextual categories (kitchen things vs. bathroom things). At all ages tested, the children performed best on the basic-level categories but, even at 12 months of age, some children were responsive to the superordinate and contextual categories. By 20 months of age, approximately half of the children showed such sensitivity. The second experiment showed that 16- and 20-month-olds differentiated basic-level categories only when the categorical contrasts were taken from different superordinate classes (e.g., dogs vs. cars) and not when the categories were drawn from the same superordinate class (e.g., dogs vs. horses). The data suggest that basic-levels categories are not the first kind of conceptual categories to be formed. Instead, it appears that children may form more global categories, with basic-level differentiation occurring later.     

Theory of mind: is training contagious?

In this study, preschool children were successfully trained in theory of mind tasks, namely false belief inference and appearance–reality distinction. Results show that both types of training had a direct effect, as measured by the improvement of performance on the FB and AR delayed post‐tests. Both types of training also had an indirect effect, as measured by transfer of the benefits of the training to the task that was not in the training. Finally, both types of training were effective even when the children were trained in a task they had already mastered.     

Shape constancy and theory of mind: is there a link?

In three experiments, children aged between 4 and 7 years viewed a circular disc oriented at a slant. The disc was made of luminous material and situated in a darkened chamber. Children of all ages exaggerated the circularity of the disc when they knew that the object was really a circle (the circle task), and the effect was greatest in the younger members of the sample. Crucially, however, a group of children in Experiment 3 who viewed an identical shape that they knew emanated from an actual ellipse did not exaggerate circularity. In the second experiment, children tackled three standard theory of mind tasks in addition to the circle task mentioned above. A significant correlation emerged (even with age partialed) between the extent of exaggeration made by those who knew that the shape was a circle and ability to pass the theory of mind tests. It seems knowledge of reality contaminates judgements of appearance in the circle task. This might be the same bias that features in realist errors in theory of mind tasks.     

Motivating meta-awareness of mind wandering: A way to catch the mind in flight?

Given the negative effects of mind wandering on performance, it may be profitable to be aware of task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) as they occur. The present study investigated whether motivating people to catch TUTs increases meta-awareness. We offered incentives for increased self-catching during reading. To enhance the veracity of these self-reports, we used a “bogus-pipeline” procedure; we convinced participants that their mental states were being covertly monitored using physiological measures. In reality, mind wandering was assessed covertly by a secondary task (“gibberish detection”), and overtly by experience sampling. The results showed that incentives increased the number of self-catches without increasing overall mind wandering. Moreover, both the bogus pipeline and the opportunity for incentives increased the validity of self-reports, evidenced by significantly increased correlations between self-caught and behaviorally assessed mind wandering. We discuss the relevance of this methodological approach for research on mind wandering and research building on introspective reports more generally.     

Metacognition and metarepresentation: is a self-directed theory of mind a precondition for metacognition?

Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity and inferential promiscuity only occur in metarepresentation. It is concluded that, although metarepresentations can redescribe metacognitive contents, metacognition and metarepresentation are functionally distinct.     

How is a trumpet known? The "basic object level" concept and perception of musical instruments

What are the object properties that serve as a basis for the musical instrument classification system, and how do general and specific experience affect knowledge of these properties? In the first study, the multimodal quality of properties underlying children's and adults' perception was investigated. Subjects listened to solos and identified instruments producing the sounds. Even children who did not have experience with all the instruments correctly identified the family of instruments they were listening to. The hypothesis of the second study, that musical instrument families function as a "basic level" in the instrument taxonomy, was confirmed. Variation in the basic level with varying expertise was documented in the third study with musicians. In the fourth study, children and adults identified the source of sounds from unfamiliar objects, Chinese musical instruments. It is suggested that the concept of affordances may be relevant for understanding the importance for behavior of different levels of abstraction of category systems.     

Was Babbage's Analytical Engine intended to be a mechanical model of the mind?

In the 1830s, Charles Babbage worked on a mechanical computer he dubbed the Analytical Engine. Although some people around Babbage described his invention as though it had authentic mental powers, Babbage refrained from making such claims. He does not, however, seem to have discouraged those he worked with from mooting the idea publicly. This article investigates whether (1) the Analytical Engine was the focus of a covert research program into the mechanism of mentality; (2) Babbage opposed the idea that the Analytical Engine had mental powers but allowed his colleagues to speculate as they saw fit; or (3) Babbage believed such claims to be fanciful, but cleverly used the publicity they engendered to draw public and political attention to his project.     

Systematic theology at the crossroads: Explication of a symbolic universe or contextualization of a redemptive message?

The article compares Ted Peters' and Klaus Nürnberger's approaches in their recently published systematic theologies. Peters retains the traditional symbolic universe, explicating it for “a new era”; Nürnberger treats the evolving tradition as a series of contextualizations that must be replaced with new contextualizations as situations change. The difference and its consequences are demonstrated in the cases of the concept of God, eschatology, and the content of the gospel. At stake is the validity of the tradition on the one hand and the plausibility of the Christian faith in a modern context on the other.     

What is the relationship between ideas in the human mind and ideas in the mind of God for Spinoza?

The relation between ideas in the human mind and ideas in the mind of God in Spinoza is problematic because it is often expressed in obscure language and because Spinoza seems to be making puzzling and contradictory statements about it. I try to eliminate the problem by going from the idea that God has of himself to his idea of the essence and existence of the human mind and the human body. I then go from the idea of the essence of the human mind to the idea of the essence of other things, including God.     

Visual adaptation of the perception of “life”: Animacy is a basic perceptual dimension of faces

One critical component of understanding another’s mind is the perception of “life” in a face. However, little is known about the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this perception of animacy. Here, using a visual adaptation paradigm, we ask whether face animacy is (1) a basic dimension of face perception and (2) supported by a common neural mechanism across distinct face categories defined by age and species. Observers rated the perceived animacy of adult human faces before and after adaptation to (1) adult faces, (2) child faces, and (3) dog faces. When testing the perception of animacy in human faces, we found significant adaptation to both adult and child faces, but not dog faces. We did, however, find significant adaptation when morphed dog images and dog adaptors were used. Thus, animacy perception in faces appears to be a basic dimension of face perception that is species specific but not constrained by age categories.     

What is a Jungian analyst dreaming when myth comes to mind? Thirdness as an aspect of the anima media natura

Listening analytically is not listening just to what is said but listening to what is just below the surface waiting to be said. This paper looks at Jung's insight into a ‘third thing’ being created intra‐psychically and within the analytic encounter. Ogden's concept of an ‘analytic third’ is used to describe the clinical aspects of this thirdness. This paper explores: how the state of thirdness is created and accessed through use of reverie and associative dreaming; how the material emerging from it is used in a from or about manner; and the eventual fate of the third in a successful analysis by a reexamination of plates four and ten of the Rosarium. The focus is particularly on the awareness and possible meanings of mythological motifs appearing in the mind of the analyst while in session. Thirdness can be viewed as the interpersonal aspect of the anima media natura and functions in a way that informs us of permeability in and between individuals, while the operation of the anima mundi means that there is always an inseparability of the individual with the world.     

Enactive or inactive? Cranially envatted dream experience and the extended conscious mind

When we dream, it is often assumed, we are isolated from the external environment. It is also commonly believed that dreams can be, at times, accurate, convincing replicas of waking experience. Here I analyse some of the implications of this view for an enactive theory of conscious experience. If dreams are, as described by the received view, “inactive”, or “cranially envatted” whilst replicating the experience of being awake, this would be problematic for certain extended conscious mind theories. Focusing specifically on Alva Noë’s enactive view, according to which the vehicles of perceptual experience extend beyond the brain, I argue that dreams are a quandary. Noë’s view is that dreaming is consistent with enactivism because even if dreams are inactive and shut off from the external environment, they are not “full-blown” perceptual consciousness, and also, there is some reason to reject the inactive claim. However, this view rests on an unjustified and reductive account of dreams which is not supported by empirical evidence. Dreams can indeed replicate waking phenomenal experience during inactive periods of sleep, and we have no reason to suspect that dreams which are more inactive are less “full-blown”. Taken together, this shows that dreams are indeed relevant to extended conscious mind theories and need to be taken into account by enactivists.     

Why do we SLIP to the basic level? Computational constraints and their implementation.

The authors introduce a new measure of basic-level performance (strategy length and internal practicability; SLIP). SLIP implements 2 computational constraints on the organization of categories in a taxonomy: the minimum number of feature tests required to place the input in a category (strategy length) and the ease with which these tests are performed (internal practicability). The predictive power of SLIP is compared with that of 4 other basic-level measures: context model, category feature possession, category utility, and compression measure, drawing data from other empirical work, and 3 new experiments testing the validity of the computational constraints of SLIP using computer-synthesized 3-dimensional artificial objects.     

Exemplarization: a solution to the problem of consciousness?

In recent publications, Keith Lehrer developed the intriguing idea of a special mental process??exemplarization??and applied it in a sophisticated manner to different phenomena such as intentionality, representation of the self, the knowledge of ineffable content (of art works) and the problem of phenomenal consciousness. In this paper I am primarily concerned with the latter issue. The target of this paper is to analyze whether exemplarization, besides explaining epistemic phenomena such as immediate and ineffable knowledge of experiences, can also solve the ontological problem of consciousness. In particular, Lehrer suggests that if we consider exemplarization, zombies cannot provide an argument for anti-physicalism. I argue that exemplarization offers neither a physicalist explanation of the conceivability of zombies nor an elucidating physicalist account of their impossibility. Therefore, exemplarization cannot offer a physicalist solution to the ??hard problem?? of consciousness.     

Is the human mind a Turing machine?

In this paper I discuss the topics of mechanism and algorithmicity. I emphasise that a characterisation of algorithmicity such as the Turing machine is iterative; and I argue that if the human mind can solve problems that no Turing machine can, the mind must depend on some non-iterative principle — in fact, Cantor's second principle of generation, a principle of the actual infinite rather than the potential infinite of Turing machines. But as there has been theorisation that all physical systems can be represented by Turing machines, I investigate claims that seem to contradict this: specifically, claims that there are noncomputable phenomena. One conclusion I reach is that if it is believed that the human mind is more than a Turing machine, a belief in a kind of Cartesian dualist gulf between the mental and the physical is concomitant.     

Motor programming: does the choice of the limb which is to carry out the response imply a delay?

In many activities, the human being must quickly decide on the response to be produced following a change in the environment. In some of these situations, the limb that the individual chooses to carry out a response seems to be a significant element in performance. Thus, if the individual carries out the response with the limb closest to the target, the performance can improve because it will take less time to achieve the goal. However, it seems that in these situations, the human being does not take this decrease in movement time into consideration and that the response is carried out with the dominant hand. Why is this so? It may be because the reaction is faster when there doesn't have to be a choice as to which limb will carry out the response. The goal of this study was to check this possibility. In order to do so, the subjects performed a two choice reaction-time task. For this task, some subjects knew beforehand which hand they had to use to carry out the response while other subjects were unaware of this fact. The results of two experiments indicated that the choice of the limb which is to carry out the response requires no particular delay when the movement to be produced is externally guided.     

The cognitive interview: is its benefit affected by the level of witness emotion?

This research investigated whether a witness's emotion could influence the accuracy of statements obtained by the use of a cognitive interview. A total of 70 first-year university students viewed a video depicting a road accident. Electrodes were attached to their arms in order to send fictitious electric shocks during the video (high-arousal condition) or to measure physiological signs (low-arousal condition). One week later, they were interviewed using either a cognitive interview (CI) or a structured interview (SI). It was hypothesised that the beneficial effect of the cognitive interview would be amplified by a high level of arousal, particularly concerning central aspects of the video. Results indicated that a CI elicited more correct central and peripheral details recalled, whatever the level of arousal inducted during the encoding of the to-be remembered event. Furthermore, high-arousal participants produced more accurate testimonies concerning peripheral details than participants exposed to a low level of arousal. No interaction between interview and emotion was found. The theoretical and practical implications for interviewing witnesses are described.