Sick? Or slow? On the origins of intelligence as a psychological object

This paper examines the first moments of the emergence of “psychometrics” as a discipline, using a history of the Binet–Simon test (precursor to the Stanford–Binet) to engage the question of how intelligence became a “psychological object.” To begin to answer this, we used a previously-unexamined set of French texts to highlight the negotiations and collaborations that led Alfred Binet (1857–1911) to identify “mental testing” as a research area worth pursuing. This included a long-standing rivalry with Désiré-Magloire Bourneville (1840–1909), who argued for decades that psychiatrists ought to be the professional arbiters of which children would be removed from the standard curriculum and referred to special education classes in asylums. In contrast, Binet sought to keep children in schools and conceived of a way for psychologists to do this. Supported by the Société libre de l'étude psychologique de l'enfant [Free society for the psychological study of the child], and by a number of collaborators and friends, he thus undertook to create a “metric” scale of intelligence—and the associated testing apparatus—to legitimize the role of psychologists in a to-that-point psychiatric domain: identifying and treating “the abnormal”. The result was a change in the earlier law requiring all healthy French children to attend school, between the ages of 6 and 13, to recognize instead that otherwise normal children sometimes need special help: they are “slow” (arriéré), but not “sick.” This conceptualization of intelligence was then carried forward, through the test's influence on Lewis Terman (1877–1956) and Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), to shape virtually all subsequent thinking about intelligence testing and its role in society.     

The parameters in the near-miss-to-Weber's law

Many empirical data support the hypothesis that the sensitivity function grows as a power function of the stimulus intensity. This is usually referred to as the near-miss-to-Weber's law. The aim of the paper is to examine the near-miss-to-Weber's law in the context of psychometric models of discrimination. We study two types of psychometric functions, characterized by the representations P_a(x)=F(ρ(a)x^γ(a)) (type A), and P_a(x)=F(γ(a)+ρ(a)x) (type B). A central result shows that both types of psychometric functions are compatible with the near-miss-to-Weber's law. If a representation of type B exists, then the exponent in the near-miss is necessarily a constant function, that is, does not depend on the criterion value used to define “just noticeably different”. If, on the other hand, a representation of type A exists, then the exponent in the near-miss-to-Weber's law can vary with the criterion value. In that case, the parameters in the near-miss co-vary systematically.     

Perspective et actualité de Pierre Janet sur les possessions et les extases mystiques

Pierre Janet (1859–1947), a professor of psychology at the collège de France (1901–1934) and the founder of the French Psychological Society in 1901, took interest in the psychology of religion very young and then all along his career. At age 15, a painful crisis of doubts changes him: he becomes atheistic and above all, gains a passion for the psychology of belief (Prévost, 1973). After his “aggregation” degree, he starts examining and curing people with mental diseases at the hospital in Le Havre. Within six years, his works would build the reference synthesis on the “dissociation of the personality”. But the dissociation process is tightly bounded to the properties of belief (L’automatisme psychologique, 1889). The presentation of his famous case “Achille” (1891–1898) possessed “by the devil” will stand for Janet as a textbook case about religious dissociation, and he will consider his successful treatment of this patient as a “modern exorcism” (Névroses et idées fixes, 1898). The famous mystic “Madeleine” who suffered from psychasthenia provided him the opportunity to precise the links between religious phenomena and the properties of belief. Madeleine's oscillations between torture, void and ecstasy, pertain to “tension” variations that directly impact her belief according to their stage – asseritive or reflected – on the Janetian hierarchy ( Janet, 1926–1928). In the second part of his life and career, where Janet takes time to think about his models and practice, he paints a large picture of the evolution of the “self” (L’Évolution psychologique de la personnalité, Janet, 1929) and extends his analysis to traditional cultures where the bounds of the self is more variable, the personality being able to include spirits within itself. The inclusion in the DSM III, of “dissociative troubles” in 1980, for its first atheoretic release, is visibly drawn upon Janet's English writings ( 0175, 0215 and 0070). Following this introduction, a great body of international studies took Janet's modelization and results into consideration (except in France). In 1994, the DSM-IV also adds the dissociative transe disorder category (DTD), which includes religious possession by demons or spirits: this leads to the development of international studies on the psychology of religion within a transcultural frame. After being forgotten for years, the experimental results of Pierre Janet currently undergo an important excavation thanks to recent psychological research, and prove their relevance to contribute to contemporary debates.     

Piéron's Law holds during stroop conflict: insights into the architecture of decision making

Piéron's Law describes the relationship between stimulus intensity and reaction time. Previously (Stafford & Gurney, 2004), we have shown that Piéron's Law is a necessary consequence of rise-to-threshold decision making and thus will arise from optimal simple decision-making algorithms (e.g., Bogacz, Brown, Moehlis, Holmes, & Cohen, 2006). Here, we manipulate the color saturation of a Stroop stimulus. Our results show that Piéron's Law holds for color intensity and color-naming reaction time, extending the domain of this law, in line with our suggestion of the generality of the processes that can give rise to Piéron's Law. In addition, we find that Stroop condition does not interact with the effect of color saturation; Stroop interference and facilitation remain constant at all levels of color saturation. An analysis demonstrates that this result cannot be accounted for by single-stage decision-making algorithms which combine all the evidence pertaining to a decision into a common metric. This shows that human decision making is not information-optimal and suggests that the generalization of current models of simple perceptual decision making to more complex decisions is not straightforward.     

Schémas cognitifs, croyances addictives et défenses dans la consommation et l’addiction au cannabis de jeunes adultes

Theoretical background

Integrating the cognitive approaches based on the model of Beck et al. (1993) information treatment, the Young (1994) model of maladapted schemas, the integrative approach of Plutchik (1995) and the clinical approach based on defense mechanisms (Bond, 1995), this study aimed at investigating: (a) the role of the hyperactivated maladapted schemas, (b) the addictive beliefs, (c) the suractivation of the conscious derives of defensive mechanisms and (d) the relationships between these cognitive and defensive variables, in young people's cannabis intensity addiction.

Method

Forty-four young adults, 25 females and 19 males, have completed a self-reported questionnaire estimating: (a) the intensity of cannabis addiction (Décamps et al., 2008), (b) the Rusinek (2006) adaptation of Young's maladapted schemas and (c) the questionnaire of addictive beliefs of Tison and Hautekeete (1998) and the defensive styles questionnaire of Bond et al. (1983) and Bond (1995). Non-parametric statistical analysis has been conducted on three subject's groups (“non-users”, “users non addicted”, “users-addicted”) to test the implications and the links between hypothesized psychological factors (e.g., schemas, beliefs and defences) in cannabis use intensity.

Results and discussion

The intensity of cannabis addiction is correlated significantly with: (a) an hyperactivation of three maladapted schemas: inadequate autocontrol, dependence and fear of lose the control, (b) a hyperactivation of permissive, anticipatory and relief oriented beliefs and (c) a higher activation of the defence “sublimation” and a lower activation of the “displacement”. “sublimation” is correlated with the global activation of 13 schemas that are correlated with the positive relief-oriented beliefs, which are correlated with the “displacement” defence, which is correlated with the anticipatory beliefs. The results showed that the permissive beliefs have the power to differentiate the “non-consumption”, the “consumption without addiction” and “the addiction” to cannabis. Our interpretation displays that greater attention to the dysfunctional beliefs will be required in future researches and should be essential targets in cognitive therapy of this substance use disorder.     

Resolution time and the coding of arithmetic relations on supraliminally different visual extents

Comparison time for pairs of vertical-line stimuli, sufficiently different that they can be errorlessly discriminated with respect to visual extent, was examined as a function of arithmetic relations (physical ratio and difference) on members of the pair. Arithmetic relations are coded very precisely by judgment time: Responses slow as stimulus ratios approach one with difference fixed, and as stimulus differences approach zero with ratio fixed. Most models which assume a simple (Difference or Ratio) resolution rule operating on independent sensations require judgment time to depend on either ratios or on differences but not on both. Further tests showed both an index based on median judgment times and a confusion index based on pairs of observed judgment times, satisfied the requirements for a Positive Difference Structure. One representation of these data, which remains acceptable through all analyses, is a Difference resolution rule operating on sensations determined by a power psychophysical function with β < 1. Specifically, L(x, y) = F{ψ(x) ? ψ(y)} + R, where L(x, y) is the judgment time with the stimulus pair x and y, ψ(x) = Ax^β + C, R is a positive constant, and F is a continuous monotone decreasing function.     

Acquiescence response style and the Vocational Development Inventory

The possible effects of acquiescence response style upon endorsement of items in the Vocational Development Inventory-Attitude Scale (VDI-Att) were investigated in an experimental paradigm. On Test “free-choice” (T,F,?) response options were presented to both the Experimental (E) and the Control (C) groups; on Retest C received the same format but E was administered a “forced-choice” (T,F,) answer sheet. One hundred male and female undergraduates were randomly assigned to the E and C groups cross-classified by sex. ANOVA on Test indicated the groups were equivalent; ANOVA on Retest yielded negative findings on acquiescence in the VDI-Att. It was concluded that responses to the VDI-Att are not significantly affected by acquiescence; rather, it was hypothesized that they can be conceptually related to discrimination learning processes.     

A theory of belief

A theory of belief is presented in which uncertainty has two dimensions. The two dimensions have a variety of interpretations. The article focusses on two of these interpretations.The first is that one dimension corresponds to probability and the other to “definiteness,” which itself has a variety of interpretations. One interpretation of definiteness is as the ordinal inverse of an aspect of uncertainty called “ambiguity” that is often considered important in the decision theory literature. (Greater ambiguity produces less definiteness and vice versa.) Another interpretation of definiteness is as a factor that measures the distortion of an individual's probability judgments that is due to specific factors involved in the cognitive processing leading to judgments. This interpretation is used to provide a new foundation for support theories of probability judgments and a new formulation of the “Unpacking Principle” of Tversky and Koehler.The second interpretation of the two dimensions of uncertainty is that one dimension of an event A corresponds to a function that measures the probabilistic strength of A as the focal event in conditional events of the form A|B, and the other dimension corresponds to a function that measures the probabilistic strength of A as the context or conditioning event in conditional events of the form C|A. The second interpretation is used to provide an account of experimental results in which for disjoint events A and B, the judge probabilities of A|(A∪B) and B|(A∪B) do not sum to 1.The theory of belief is axiomatized qualitatively in terms of a primitive binary relation ? on conditional events. (A|B?C|D is interpreted as “the degree of belief of A|B is greater than the degree of belief of C|D.”) It is shown that the axiomatization is a generalization of conditional probability in which a principle of conditional probability that has been repeatedly criticized on normative grounds may fail.Representation and uniqueness theorems for the axiomatization demonstrate that the resulting generalization is comparable in mathematical richness to finitely additive probability theory.     

Triadic judgment models and Weber's law

Let a, b, c, with a?b?c, be positive real numbers indicating the intensities of physical stimuli in a psychophysical experiment; let P_abc be the probability that b is judged to be more similar to a (“closer to”) a than to c. This paper investigates the following representation and its subcases for triadic judgments

P_abc=F[u(a)-u(b),u(b)-u(c)],     

The embodied cognition theory and the motor component of “yes” and “no” verbal responses

Most of the experiments which give theories of embodied cognition their empirical anchorage only take into consideration the motor responses induced by the task or the motor component of the visual stimulus. And yet, these motor responses are often associated with a linguistic answer. Our hypothesis is that “YES” and “NO” verbal responses have a motor component. In a first experiment we showed that producing a verbal response (YES vs. NO) involves motor planning (pushing vs. pulling): participants push a lever more quickly when they have to answer “yes” than “no”, and conversely, they pull a lever more quickly when they have to answer “no” than “yes”. Moreover, in a second experiment, we showed that perceiving the words “YES” and “NO”, on its own, leads to the same motor planning than when “yes” and “no” answers actually have to be produced. Participants detect the word “YES” faster when they have to push a lever than when they have to pull it and conversely they detect the word “NO” faster when they have to pull the lever than when they have to push it down. These results are discussed in reference to “online” and “offline embodiment” concepts and to the cognitive linguistic theories.     

The conjunction fallacy: a misunderstanding about conjunction?

It is easy to construct pairs of sentences X, Y that lead many people to ascribe higher probability to the conjunction X-and-Y than to the conjuncts X, Y. Whether an error is thereby committed depends on reasoners’ interpretation of the expressions “probability” and “and.” We report two experiments designed to clarify the normative status of typical responses to conjunction problems.     

Objects, events and "to be" verbs in Spanish--an ERP study of the syntax-semantics interface

In Spanish, objects and events at subject position constrain the selection of different forms of the auxiliary verb “to be”: locative predicates about objects require “estar en”, while those relating to events require “ser en”, both translatable as “to be in”. Subjective ratings showed that while the “object + ser + en” is considered as incorrect, the “event + estar + en” combination is also perceived as unacceptable but to a lesser degree. In an ERP study, we evaluated the impact of a purely semantic distinction (object versus events) on the subsequent processing of these auxiliary verbs followed by locatives in Spanish. For the “ser en” predicate, the P600 component was larger when the subject was an object than when it was an event. This P600 effect is consistent with an online repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. On the other hand, for the “estar en” predicate, event subjects when compared to object subjects showed more positive ongoing amplitudes between 280 and 380 ms after the presentation of the “en” preposition, followed by a longer positive wave starting around 400 ms and lasting until 700 ms after the presentation of the following determiner, with central and frontal scalp distributions respectively. Thus, the different subject-predicate combinations, depending on the semantic features of the subjects, triggered syntactic reparatory processes at a structural level. These findings are consistent with an incremental interpretation of sentence meaning based on the interaction between syntactic and semantic information.     

Language, thought, and real nouns

We test the claim that acquiring a mass-count language, like English, causes speakers to think differently about entities in the world, relative to speakers of classifier languages like Japanese. We use three tasks to assess this claim: object-substance rating, quantity judgment, and word extension. Using the first two tasks, we present evidence that learning mass-count syntax has little effect on the interpretation of familiar nouns between Japanese and English, and that speakers of these languages do not divide up referents differently along an individuation continuum, as claimed in some previous reports [Gentner, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relativity, and early word learning. In M. Bowerman, & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 215-256). Cambridge University Press]. Instead, we argue that previous cross-linguistic differences [Imai, M., & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62, 169-200] are attributable to “lexical statistics” [Gleitman, L., & Papafragou, A. (2005). Language and thought. In K. Holyoak, & R. Morrison (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 633-661). Cambridge University Press]. Speakers of English are more likely to think that a novel ambiguous expression like “the blicket” refers to a kind of object (relative to speakers of Japanese) because speakers of English are likely to assume that “blicket” is a count noun rather than a mass noun, based on the relative frequency of each kind of word in English. This is confirmed by testing Mandarin-English bilinguals with a word extension task. We find that bilinguals tested in English with mass-count ambiguous syntax extend novel words like English monolinguals (and assume that a word like “blicket” refers to a kind of object). In contrast, bilinguals tested in Mandarin are significantly more likely to extend novel words by material. Thus, online lexical statistics, rather than non-linguistic thought, mediate cross-linguistic differences in word extension. We suggest that speakers of Mandarin, English, and Japanese draw on a universal set of lexical meanings, and that mass-count syntax allows speakers of English to select among these meanings.     

Hick’s law equivalent for reaction time to individual stimuli

Hick’s law, one of the few law-like relationships involving human performance, expresses choice reaction time as a linear function of the mutual information between the stimulus and response events. However, since this law was first proposed in 1952, its validity has been challenged by the fact that it only holds for the overall reaction time (RT) across all the stimuli, and does not hold for the reaction time (RT_i) for each individual stimulus. This paper introduces a new formulation in which RT_i is a linear function of (1) the mutual information between the event that stimulus i occurs and the set of all potential response events and (2) the overall mutual information for all stimuli and responses. Then Hick’s law for RT follows as the weighted mean of each side of the RT_i equation using the stimulus probabilities as the weights. The new RT_i equation incorporates the important speed–accuracy trade-off characteristic. When the performance is error-free, RT_i becomes a linear function of two entropies as measures of stimulus uncertainty or unexpectancy. Reanalysis of empirical data from a variety of sources provide support for the new law-like relationship.     

Sources and influence of perceptual variance: Comment on Dzhafarov's Regular Minimality Principle

Dzhafarov [(2002). Multidimensional Fechnerian scaling: Pairwise comparisons, regular minimality, and nonconstant self-similarity. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 46, 583-608] claims that Regular Minimality (RM) is a fundamental property of “same-different” discrimination probabilities and supports his claim with some empirical evidence. The key feature of RM is that the mapping, h, between two observation areas based on minimum discrimination probability is invertible. Dzhafarov [(2003a). Thurstonian-type representations for “same-different” discriminations: Deterministic decisions and independent images. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 47, 184-204; (2003b). Thurstonian-type representations for “same-different” discriminations: Probabilistic decisions and interdependent images. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 47, 229-243] also demonstrates that well-behaved Thurstonian models of “same-different” judgments are incompatible with RM and Nonconstant Self-Similarity (NCSS). There is extensive empirical support for the latter. Stimulus and neural sources of perceptual noise are discussed and two points are made:

Point 1: Models that require discrimination probabilities for noisy stimuli to possess the property that h is invertible would be too restrictive.

Point 2: In the absence of stimulus noise, violations of RM may be so subtle that their detection would be unlikely.

     

Neuropsychology, neuroscience, volitional impairment and sexually violent predators: A review of the literature and the law and their application to civil commitment proceedings

The U.S. Supreme Court held in Kansas v. Crane, the person's mental abnormality or personality disorder must cause the individual to have “serious difficulty in controlling his sexual behavior,” rather than “total or complete lack of control.” While most state civil commitment statutes do not mandate this volitional impairment language relevant to loss of control, they instead incorporate the requirement of findings of “likely” or “likelihood” to reoffend. Yet in some of these state SVP hearings, the forensic mental health expert witnesses testify as to the offender's ability to control his sex offending behaviors. Occasionally, some of these experts are neuropsychologists and neurologists who testify about a sex offender's neurological and cognitive impairment resulting in sexually deviant behavior, volitional impairment, and likelihood of reoffending. This article's focus is to assess deviant sexual offending behaviors and volitional impairment through a neuropsychological and neurological lens. The author will provide an analysis of the literature as to the structural and functional neurocognitive processes of sex offending pertaining to neuropathology, neuropsychology, and neuroimaging data. The author will attempt to apply these findings to the legal requirements outlined in Crane necessitating commitment of sex offenders who experience some volitional impairment in their behaviors that lead them to be likely to sexually reoffend. The author will review state case law addressing neuroscience in SVP proceedings.     

A counterexample to Fishburn's conjecture on finite linear qualitative probability

Kraft, Pratt and Seidenberg (Ann. Math. Statist. 30 (1959) 408) provided an infinite set of axioms which, when taken together with de Finetti's axiom, gives a necessary and sufficient set of “cancellation” conditions for representability of an ordering relation on subsets of a set by an order-preserving probability measure. Fishburn (1996) defined f(n) to be the smallest positive integer k such that every comparative probability ordering on an n-element set which satisfies the cancellation conditions C₄,…,C_k is representable. By the work of Kraft, Pratt, and Seidenberg (1959) and Fishburn (J. Math. Psychol. 40 (1996) 64; J. Combin. Design 5 (1997) 353), it is known that n-1?f(n)?n+1 for all n?5. Also Fishburn proved that f(5)=4, and conjectured that f(n)=n-1 for all n?5. In this paper we confirm that f(6)=5, but give counter-examples to Fishburn's conjecture for n=7, showing that f(7)?7. We summarise, correct and extend many of the known results on this topic, including the notion of “almost representability”, and offer an amended version of Fishburn's conjecture.     

Pour une poétique des jeux de langage

Malgré le refus que Wittgenstein semble avoir toujours opposé à l'idée d'une esthétique philosophique, son oeuvre et les nombreuses suggestions que contiennent ses divers propos se révélent riches d'enseignements, en particulier pour ce qui concerne les voies dans lesquelles certaines formes de discours sur l'art se sot engagées. La notion wittgensteinienne dejeu de langage est, sous ce rapport, éclairante. Elle permet de mettre au jour, ou du moins d'entrevoir, deux catégories de faits. Tout d'abord, elle offre une perspective critique intéressante sur le programme de ce que l'on s'est plu à nommer une poétique, dans le prolongement d'Aristote, de Jakobson et de Valéry. La poétique structuraliste, en particulier, se révéle solidaire d'une philosophie que ses ambitions théoriques ne suffisent pas à occulter. En second lieu, la notion de jeu de langage, chez Wittgenstein lui-même, est associée à une pratique d'écriture originale qui obscurcit les frontiéres que la philosophie, depuis Platon, s'est toujours souciée de tracer. Pour une poétique des jeux de langage, il existe, entre la poétique et la philosophie une double symétrie. La premiére — celle des structuralistes ou des néo-structuralistes —obéit à un programme plus philosophique qu'on ne croit; la second, en revanche, comme on le voit avec Wittgenstein, intégr une démarche poétique qui nous invite à penser à nouveaux frais ce que nous faisons.     

Similar threshold functions from contrasting neural signal models

Three neural signal models of increment threshold detection are compared. All assume that the criterion for threshold is the attainment of a critical, minimum neural signal (or difference between two neural signals), and that the signal due to a test flash of intensity λ in the absence of a background light is $\text{λ}\text{(λ + σ)}$ (where σ is the semi-saturation constant). The models differ in the manner in which a background light of intensity θ is assumed to affect the signal. One model (due to Alpern et al., 1970a, Alpern et al., 1970b, Alpern et al., 1970c) assumes that the test flash signal, $\text{λ}\text{(λ + σ)}$, is attenuated by the multiplicative factor $\text{θ}{}_{\mathrm{D}}\text{(θ + θ}{}_{\mathrm{D}}\text{)}$ (where θ_D is a constant interpreted as sensory noise); another model specifies that the test flash signal is simply reduced (by subtraction) by the amount $\text{θ}\text{(θ + K)}$ (K a constant). One main result of this paper is that in the absence of pigment bleaching, these two models imply indistinguishable increment threshold functions. Further, a necessary and sufficient condition for each model guaranteeing the absence of saturation with steady backgrounds is found to be empirically satisfied. A third model is considered where the background field is assumed both to contribute to the neural signal and simultaneously to attenuate it (via a gain change). These assumptions are closely related to theoretical accounts of color induction and color perception. Though this model needs further investigation, it appears to be in better accord with actual increment threshold data than the others.     

Die Rechtsansichten der Eurasier -- Rechtsordnung oder Wertordnung?

In their juridical doctrines, the members of the Evrazijstvo movement advocated the idea of a Russian special path criticizing at the same time the formalism and coldness of the western conception of law, based principally on Roman law. Their views are characterized by an evident priority accorded to justice over law, to the order of values over legal order.