The Houston Conference: The Road More Traveled

Neuropsychology Review -     

The Solution to the Surprise Exam Paradox

The Surprise Exam Paradox continues to perplex and torment despite the many solutions that have been offered. This paper proposes to end the intrigue once and for all by refuting one of the central pillars of the Surprise Exam Paradox, the “No Friday Argument,” which concludes that an exam given on the last day of the testing period cannot be a surprise. This refutation consists of three arguments, all of which are borrowed from the literature: the “Unprojectible Announcement Argument,” the “Wright & Sudbury Argument,” and the “Epistemic Blindspot Argument.” The reason that the Surprise Exam Paradox has persisted this long is not because any of these arguments is problematic. On the contrary, each of them is correct. The reason that it has persisted so long is because each argument is only part of the solution. The correct solution requires all three of them to be combined together. Once they are, we may see exactly why the No Friday Argument fails and therefore why we have a solution to the Surprise Exam Paradox that should stick.     

The origin of creative achievement: Spontaneity,responsibility, and individuals

Abstract

Simonton's essay raises a variety of problems and implies several directions for future inquiry. One problem concerns the need to select and focus the target so that the question of how pathologies affect originality does not apply simply to any act of making or writing, including routine processes. There is also a need to sort out the conditions under which creative persons or societies select subjects or content and how well or poorly they succeed in expressing insights about these subjects. The main problem concerns clearly distinguishing between and addressing either or both of two issues: (1) pathologies of whole societies and their creative output, or (2) the impacts of social pathologies on individuals within society. Attacking the last problem is important if we are to understand where the locus of responsibility for originality lies. It is suggested that the workings of creative activity should be studied by concentrating on how metaphors work.     

The Origins of Wittgenstein's Imaginary Scenarios: Something Old, Something New

The imaginary scenarios that appear in nearly every work of the later Wittgenstein – ones involving laughing cattle, disembodied eyes that see, and the like – are decidedly absent from the Tractatus. What necessitated this change in methodology? A comparison of the Tractatus with the Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein's first major work after his return to philosophy, reveals that these devices are the product of something old and something new. The rationale for these devices is already present in the notion of a “propositional variable,” but Wittgenstein had little use for them until he rejected the phenomenological language and laconic style of the Tractatus.     

Something Old, Something New: Evidence of Self-Accommodation to Gendered Social Change

Two studies examined how individuals adapt the self to social trends—in particular, when the social roles of the gender ingroup change, do people readily leave behind traditional roles in favor of nontraditional roles? We hypothesized that self-relevant cognitions and behaviors would accommodate to societal change, and we found that this accommodation took the shape of greater acceptance of nontraditional roles alongside continued acceptance of traditional roles. Experiment 1 included 112 undergraduates from the Midwestern U.S. who learned about social change or social stability by reading articles ostensibly published in a newspaper. Individuals who learned about social change for their gender ingroup, relative to those learning about social stability, projected greater personal success in careers, particularly for gender-nontraditional careers. Experiment 2 examined behavioral responses to social change in a sample of 198 female undergraduates from the Midwestern U.S. Participants learned about social change or social stability and then chose to view either a website focused on physical appearance (i.e., traditional choice) or leadership (i.e., nontraditional choice). Behavioral responses to social change reflected accommodation to the anticipated social structure: Individuals who learned about social change chose to view information about nontraditional rather than traditional roles. These studies provide initial experimental evidence investigating how individuals adapt the self to the social structure.     

Accommodating Surprise in Taxonomic Tasks: The Role of Expertise

This paper reports a psychological study of human categorization that looked at the procedures used by expert scientists when dealing with puzzling items. Five professional botanists were asked to specify a category from a set of positive and negative instances. The target category in the study was defined by a feature that was unusual, hence situations of uncertainty and puzzlement were generated. Subjects were asked to think aloud while solving the tasks, and their verbal reports were analyzed. A number of problem solving strategies were identified, and subsequently integrated in a model of knowledge‐guided inductive categorization. Our model proposes that expert knowledge influences the subjects' reasoning in more complex ways than suggested by earlier investigations of scientific reasoning. As in previous studies, domain knowledge influenced our subjects' hypothesis generation and testing; but, additionally, it played a central role when subjects revised their hypotheses.     

The Problem of Moral Spontaneity in the Guodian Corpus

This paper discusses certain conceptual tensions in a set of archeological texts from the Warring States period, the Guodian corpus. One of the central themes of the Guodian corpus is the disanalogy between spontaneous, natural familial relationships and artificial political relationships. This is problematic because, like many early Chinese texts, the Guodian corpus believes that political relationships must come to be characterized by unselfconsciousness and spontaneity if social order is to prevail. This tension will be compared to my earlier work on the “paradox of wu-wei (effortless action),” and the Guodian corpus’ “solution” to the problem of teaching spontaneity—drawing upon the transformative power of music—will be placed within the landscape of early “Confucian” and “Daoist” theories concerning human nature and self-cultivation.

情景知觉中的信息界定:从主观预期到“惊奇”算法

情景信息加工是情景知觉研究领域内的核心问题。然而,不同的研究者对"情景信息"的界定并不相同。在过去80多年的时间里对情景信息的界定先后经历了研究者主观确定、观察者评估、基于情景物理特征的计算模拟等方法。Itti和Baldi等人通过比较先验概率和后验概率之间的差异,提出了"惊奇"理论。文章介绍了真实情景知觉研究中"惊奇"理论的应用及进展,并指出"惊奇"算法的拓展及界定、情景知觉过程中的注意转换与"惊奇"的关系,以及社会情景知觉中的"惊奇"应用可能是未来相关领域需要进一步探索的问题。     

Toward a Process Analysis of Emotions: The Case of Surprise

Based on an earlier model of the processes elicited by surprising events, the present studies provide evidence for one of these processes, the evaluation of the surprising event's relevance for ongoing activities (action-relevance check). The central prediction tested was that, if unexpected events elicit among other processes an action-relevance check, then response delay on a concurrent task will be more pronounced in a condition where this process is more elaborate and hence takes more time. In accord with this prediction, Experiment 1 found that an unexpected appearance change of the imperative stimulus in a choice reaction time (RT) task caused greater response delay than an equivalent appearance change of a distractor stimulus. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and tested several additional predictions that concerned the effects on response delay of a second appearance change of either the imperative or the distractor stimuli. These predictions, which were also mostly confirmed, were derived by combining the logic underlying the first study with the assumption that once made, appraisals of unexpected events are stored as part of the situational schema and are reused when the same or similar events reoccur leading to an abbreviation of appraisal processes. Experiment 3 once more replicated the basic finding of the previous studies and ruled out a possible alternative explanation. It is suggested that the proposed RT method of process verification may be of broader interest as a tool to study appraisal processes in emotion.     

Surprise in the Context of Achievement: The Role of Outcome Valence and Importance

Five experiments examined the eliciting conditions of surprise in achievement situations. The present research tested an extension of the commonly accepted approach of regarding surprise as an emotion elicited by the unexpectedness of events. Specifically, the present extension posits that outcome valence and importance have effects on expectancy formation and thereby on surprise if expectancies are disconfirmed. It is posited that an achievement outcome's valence, importance, and expectancy are confounded because positive valence and high importance of an outcome are correlated with high desirability, which in turn increases expectancy. Consequently, an important failure should contain the highest expectancy-disconfirmation and thus elicit the highest surprise. Furthermore, in contrast to a thesis proposed by Weiner, Russel, and Lerman (1978, 1979), surprise was expected to be independent of the attribution of an outcome to luck or chance. The results of all five studies supported the present reasoning in experiments using vignettes (Studies 1 to 4), as well as in an actual achievement situation (Study 5). All of these studies provide empirical evidence of the predicted interaction effect between outcome valence and importance on surprise elicitation via expectancy-disconfirmation and thus lend support to the present extension of the expectancy-disconfirmation approach. But contrary to the approach suggested by Weiner et al., no general or causal relationships were found between attributions and surprise.     

Surprise but not coherence: Sensitivity to verbal humor in right-hemisphere patients

Verbal humor deficits were investigated in right-hemisphere-damaged patients. It was hypothesized that the appreciation of jokes presupposes two elements: sensitivity to the surprise element entailed in the punch line of a joke and apprehension of the coherence which results when the punch line has been integrated with the body of the joke. The possible dissociation between these elements was tested by asking subjects to select from four alternatives the appropriate ending to a joke. Right-hemisphere patients exhibited a selective attraction to endings which contained an element of surprise but which were not otherwise coherent with the body of the joke. This finding suggests that right-hemisphere patients have difficulty in integrating content across parts of a narrative and confirms the psychological reality of the proposed distinction between the surprise and coherence elements of humor processing.     

Something Old,Something New: Revisiting Guilford's Conception of Creative Problem Solving

Over the course of his career, Guilford produced a remarkable body of research on creative thought. Today, this research is remembered primarily for its articulation of the notion that divergent thinking plays a key role in creative thought. However, a number of other capacities relevant to understanding creative thought were identified in the course of this research effort. In this article, I review this research program as a whole with special reference to those capacities that warrant more attention in current studies of creativity. Implications for current research are discussed.     

Something More Than Words: A Review of (Re-)Defining Racism: A Philosophical Analysis,Alberto G. Urquidez

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - Drawing on the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alberto G. Urquidez works to free the fly (i.e. race/racism) from the metaphorical bottle by shifting the terms...     

How to Stand for Something: Toward a Genealogy of Exemplars

This paper responds to the focus issue on exemplarity that includes contributions by Kyle Lambelet, Brian Hamilton, and Gustavo Maya. The paper calls attention to ancient, medieval, and modern precedents that ought to inform our thinking about the ethical and political significance of exemplars.