Organisation: what levels of processing are levels of

The psychology of thought and memory has historically been concerned with a struggle between associationism and its opponents. Organisation theory--in part an offspring of Gestalt concepts--has been the most successful and vocal of these contenders. The levels-of-processing framework has been a part of the effort to overcome associationist predilections. Aspects of principles of organisation and of the recent history of organisation theory are presented, followed by an analysis of the levels-of-processing approach in terms of organisational concepts.     

What Incompleteness Arguments are and What They are Not

Cappelen and Lepore (2005) maintain that Incompleteness Arguments for context sensitivity are fallacious. In their view, Incompleteness Arguments are non sequitur fallacies whose conclusions are not logically related to premises. They affirm that the conclusions of Incompleteness Arguments are metaphysical claims about the existence of entities that might be constituents of propositions, while their premises concern psychological data about speakers' dispositions to truth evaluate sentences in contexts of utterance. Cappelen and Lepore reject Incompleteness Arguments because psychological data have no bearing on metaphysical issues. I do not dispute Cappelen and Lepore's claim that psychological data have no relevance to metaphysics. Nonetheless, I argue that Cappelen and Lepore's criticism is vitiated by a misunderstanding of the nature of Incompleteness Arguments that makes them overlook the link between semantics and linguistic competence. I try to shed light on the real nature of Incompleteness Arguments by pointing at the failure of Cappelen and Lepore's criticism. My aim is not to defend Semantic Contextualism, but to bring to attention the link between semantics and linguistic competence that should never be overlooked in debates in the field of semantics.     

Repetition blindness: levels of processing

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to detect or recall repetitions of words in rapid serial visual presentation. Experiment 1 showed that synonym pairs are not susceptible to RB. In Experiments 2 and 3, RB was still found when one occurrence of the word was part of a compound noun phrase. In Experiment 4, homonyms produced RB if they were spelled identically (even if pronounced differently) but not if spelled differently and pronounced the same. Similarly spelled but otherwise unrelated word pairs appeared to generate RB (Experiment 5), but Experiment 6 produced an alternative account. Experiments 7 and 8 demonstrated that repeated letters are susceptible to RB only when displayed individually, not as part of two otherwise different words. It is concluded that RB can occur at either an orthographic (possibly morphemic) level or a case-independent letter level, depending on which unit (words or single letters) is the focus of processing.     

Higher levels of depression are associated with reduced global bias in visual processing

Sleep-related attentional bias is a well-documented finding in patients with primary insomnia. To address the question of whether attentional preference for sleep-related stimuli is due to sleepiness (as measured by the Stanford Sleepiness Scale; SSS) or sleeplessness (as measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index; PSQI) we investigated 105 non-clinical participants with two attentional bias tasks, an emotional Stroop task and a newly introduced mixed-modality task. The emotional Stroop task revealed significant positive linear relationships between sleep-related attentional bias and both poor sleep quality and sleepiness. Additionally, we found a significant negative interaction effect between these two variables on the cognitive bias. This means that attentional bias scores are reduced when poor sleep quality is associated with high sleepiness and high sleep quality is associated with low sleepiness. We did not find any significant result in the mixed-modality task. The results suggest that sleep-related attentional bias can be elicited by both sleepiness and sleeplessness.     

What are Physical Properties

This paper concerns an issue in the metaphysics of properties. The issue is: what are physical properties? What distinguishes physical properties from all other properties? My conclusions will be ‘downbeat’. I will argue that some major recent approaches to this issue prove unsatisfactory, and that the issue is much more intractable than has widely been supposed. The moral I draw is that there is no principled and well-defined distinction between physical properties and all other properties, and accordingly certain programmes in metaphysics should be abandoned because they mistakenly assume that there is such a distinction.     

Specifying levels of processing

This study examines the nature of stimulus processing under semantic and nonsemantic orienting instructions. Two experiments are reported in which subjects were presented with a series of trials each beginning with the presentation of a “decision word” about which they made either a semantic or non-semantic orienting decision. This decision was followed by a word in coloured ink whose colour subjects were required to name as quickly as possible. On half the trails the coloured word was the primary associate of the decision word whilst on the other half the two words were normatively unrelated. On completion of the experiments the subjects were given an unexpected free recall test. The semantic orienting condition led to longer colour naming latencies on associate trials whilst no such difference was found in the non-semantic condition. The semantic condition also produced higher levels of incidental recall although paradoxically an analysis of associative clustering in recall failed to show any difference between the two orienting conditions. The results are interpreted as support for the “Levels of Processing” approach to memory since they provide an index of processing depth which is independent of retention performance.     

Intensionality: What are Intensional Transitives?: Jennifer Saul

This paper discusses the question of which verbs are intensional transitives. In particular, I ask which verbs Forbes should take to be intensional transitives. I argue that it is very difficult to arrive at a clear and plausible understanding of what an intensional transitive is— making it difficult to answer these questions. I end by briefly raising some questions about the usefulness of the category of intensional transitives.     

你们要什么

耶稣问门徒：“你们要什么?”要清楚我们要什么,不妨先问问自己：我可以不要什么?我可以不要什么呢?细观你现在所拥有的,你会发现,从前你拼命想要得到的很多东西,今天是你所不需要的。当我们决定告诉上帝,我要什么时,不妨先清楚我可以不要什么;当我们决定向上帝要什么时,不妨先下定决心我要为此舍弃什么!     

Interactions among levels of processing

This article examines associations among representations of physical, name, and category information by determining effects of category repetition on and following physical, name, and category match trials. Subjects decided whether two letters were from the same half of the alphabet. Category repetition effects were evidenced by faster ~nd more accurate responses when letters from the same half of the alphabet were used on successive trials. Although physical matches showed no effect of category repetition, name and category matches did. Trials following physical matches were less affected by category repetition than were trials following name or category matches. The results suggested that these category repetition effects were mediated by interletter associations: Reaction time increased with the alphabetic distance between preceding and current letters. However, these distance effects held only for forward (A → B) and not backward (B → A) alphabetic sequences, suggesting that the alphabetic representation is ordinal and unidirectional.     

Noise and levels of processing

Three experiments investigated the view that people make more use of relatively surface levels of coding when noise is present, neglecting semantic levels of analysis. In experiment 1 subjects classified words in different ways and then recalled as many as possible. Subjects who received the noise conditions in the order noise-quiet recalled more words than those who received the conditions in the order quiet-noise, but noise failed to interact with the nature of the classification conditions although the usual advantage of the semantic condition over letter-case and rhyme conditions was obtained. Experiment 2 failed to show any effect of noise on physical-name match differences when letter pairs were presented simultaneously. In experiment 3 a delay was introduced between the letters; the noise-quiet subjects were then faster on the physical match than the name match whereas the slower quiet-noise subjects showed the reverse pattern. This could represent an instance of asymmetric transfer from noise to quiet or it could be due to speed per se.Overall, these results argue against a general explanation of noise effects in terms of a passive shift in levels of processing.     

Broadening behavioral decision research: Multiple levels of cognitive processing

The area of behavioral decision research—specifically, the work on heuristics and biases—has had a tremendous influence on basic research, applied research, and application over the last 25 years. Its unique juxtaposition against economics has provided important benefits, but at the cost of leaving it disconnected from too much of psychology. This paper explores an expanded definition of behavioral decision research through the consideration of multiple levels of cognitive processing. Rather than being limited to how decision makers depart from optimality, we offer a broader analysis of how decision makers define the decision problem and link decisions to goals, as well as a more detailed focus on processes associated with implementing decisions.     

What readers bring to the processing of fictional texts

Research on text processing has generally focused on the types of inferences that all readers draw in common. Our research examines aspects of processing that depend on the particular relation of the reader to the text. Students read fictional stories that contained weak and unsupported assertions and that were set either at their own school or at another school. We expected that they would be prompted to process the story information thoroughly enough to reject the assertions only if they were familiar with the story setting. Consistent with this expectation, the results showed that the away-school story, but not the home-school story, had a significant impact on students’ beliefs. These results support the view that readers must actively construct disbelief when processing fictional information.     

Organisation of executive functions: Hemispheric asymmetries

This address provides a review of evidence for a deconstruction of executive functions, the set of cognitive operations which allow goal-directed behaviour. The underlying working hypothesis is that some complementary and computationally diverse executive functions are dissociable not only functionally but also temporally and anatomically, along the left-right axis of prefrontal cortex and related neural networks. In particular, criterion setting—the capacity to flexibly set up and select task rules—is more left-lateralised; monitoring—the process of continuously evaluating the internal or external contingencies to optimise behaviour—is more right-lateralised; finally, superior medial prefrontal regions, including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, play a role in energising weakly activated but relevant processes. Several lines of empirical evidence, including neuroimaging and neuropsychological findings, are presented to support this tripartite model of executive functions. Evidence which is difficult to explain with this model and some future directions are also discussed.