Non-Informative Effects of Stimuli Functioning as Cues

The category of a first stimulus (S₁) serving as a cue may allow a subject to predict the category of a second stimulus (S₂). However, a cue may have effects on RT to S₂ that are independent of those derived from its intended role as a predictor. These non-informative effects of a cue may add to or subtract from the benefits associated with its predictive function. Two experiments demonstrate that when S₁ is in the same category as S₂ (as is frequently the case for valid cues in cueing experiments) but provides no information about S₂, RT is slower than when S₁ is in a different category from S₂. It is suggested that this category relation effect arises because inhibition of a response to S₁ is still present when S₂ arrives and that, in some cueing experiments, it may subtract from the RT benefits derived from the cue as a predictor of S₂. Also, RT to a visual but not to an auditory S₂ was faster after an auditory S₁ than after a visual S₁. It is argued that this modality combination effect is consistent with the view that auditory signals are more alerting than visual ones and that this is another factor to be taken into account in the design of cueing and other experiments.     

STABILIZING ALETHIC PLURALISM

Alethic pluralism is the view that the nature of truth is not uniform across domains. There are several ways of being true (T₁ ... T_n). A simple argument, the 'instability challenge', purports to show that this view is inherently unstable. One can simply say that something is uniformly true if and only if it is T₁ or ... or T_n. Being uniformly true is a single truth property that applies across the board, and so the nature of truth is uniform across domains, contra pluralism. I defend pluralism against the instability challenge. I show that the challenge bifurcates: one challenge is formulated in terms of predicates, and the other is formulated in terms of properties. The pluralist has the resources to defuse both of these. The sparse/abundant property distinction and considerations of explanatory asymmetry play a crucial role in my argument.     

The role of visual information in the processing of

Visual information provided by a talker’s mouth movements can influence the perception of certain speech features. Thus, the “McGurk effect” shows that when the syllable /bi/ is presented audibly, in synchrony with the syllable /gi/, as it is presented visually, a person perceives the talker as saying /di/. Moreover, studies have shown that interactions occur between place and voicing features in phonetic perception, when information is presented audibly. In our first experiment, we asked whether feature interactions occur when place information is specified by a combination of auditory and visual information. Members of an auditory continuum ranging from /ibi/ to /ipi/ were paired with a video display of a talker saying /igi/. The auditory tokens were heard as ranging from /ibi/ to /ipi/, but the auditory-visual tokens were perceived as ranging from /idi/ to /iti/. The results demonstrated that the voicing boundary for the auditory-visual tokens was located at a significantly longer VOT value than the voicing boundary for the auditory continuum presented without the visual information. These results demonstrate that place-voice interactions are not limited to situations in which place information is specified audibly. In three follow-up experiments, we show that (1) the voicing boundary is not shifted in the absence of a change in the global percept, even when discrepant auditory-visual information is presented; (2) the number of response alternatives provided for the subjects does not affect the categorization or the VOT boundary of the auditory-visual stimuli; and (3) the original effect of a VOT boundary shift is not replicated when subjects are forced by instruction to \ldrelabel\rd the /b-p/auditory stimuli as/d/or/t/. The subjects successfully relabeled the stimuli, but no shift in the VOT boundary was observed.     

The Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Communication as a Predictor of Marital Satisfaction Over Time

There is ample evidence that marital dissatisfaction is associated concurrently with demand/withdraw, the marital pattern of communication in which one spouse nags or criticizes while the other avoids. However, the connection between demand/withdraw and changes in satisfaction is less clear. Some studies suggest that demand/withdraw is associated with low but steady marital satisfaction; other studies imply that demand/withdraw predicts declines in satisfaction; and still others indicate that demand/withdraw foreshadows increases in marital satisfaction. The current longitudinal study of married couples (N = 46) examined the connection between demand/withdraw and changes in satisfaction. The results suggest that the correlation between demand/withdraw and dissatisfaction endures to some extent, but also that demand/withdraw predicts increases in wives' satisfaction. Comparisons of the current study to previous studies of demand/withdraw imply that the association between demand/withdraw and marital satisfaction may be more complex than heretofore assumed, suggesting that future research ought to consider whether different ways of enacting demand/withdraw vary in their impact on marriage.     

Task predictability and performance as determinants of confidence in multiple-cue judgments

Two experiments were performed in order to study judges' confidence in their judgments. Experiment I showed that judges' confidence is a direct function of the cue intercorrelation. r_ij in a pure judgmental task. When judges recieved feedback, the effect of r_ij on confidence was, as predicted, reduced. Confidence was, however, systematically related to neither R ²_c nor performance in the feedback condition. Experiment II was a further study of the effect of feedback on confidence. In addition, the hypothesis that the lack of relation between performance and confidence is due to judges' poor knowledge of how they actually perform in probabilistic inference tasks was tested. The experiment showed that differences among judges' confidence is a direct function of task predictability and that judges' confidence is related to how they believe that they perform rather than to how they actually perform. The theoretical as well as the practical importance of studies of confidence in probabilistic inference tasks was discussed.     

Phenomenal causation at a distance

The aim of this research was to study the finding by Michotte, that a moving object A can apparently produce movement in a projectile B without making contact with it.

The experiments confirm the existence of a causal impression of “pushing at a distance,” but they demonstrate that the greater the distance the smaller the chance that this impression will occur.

When it does, in fact, occur, it has the same characteristics, and is associated with the same experimental conditions, as the impression of “pushing with contact.”

Temporal continuity must obtain between the stopping of the moving object and the starting of the projectile; this refutes any theory positing that there is a “passage” of movement from one object to the other. The effects of differences in speed of movement, whether absolute or relative, are similar in both instances.

In general, however, it appears that distance slightly accentuates the segregation of the movements and that the temporal and kinematic conditions of integration require to be more favourable in the case of distance, if an impression of pushing is to be given which is as satisfying as that found in the case of direct contact.

The size of the Radius of Action, that is, the extent of the passive phase of the projectile, is of the same order in the two cases.

The results bring out the fundamentally temporal-kinematic nature of the perceptual pattern of pushing. They appear difficult to reconcile with an interpretation based on past experience, but tally with the theory of “Ampliation of Movement” put forward by Michotte. According to this theory the essential point lies in the phenomenal transitory belonging to A (the moving object) of the movement performed by B (the projectile).     

The Pervasiveness of 1/f Scaling in Speech Reflects the Metastable Basis of Cognition

Human neural and behavioral activities have been reported to exhibit fractal dynamics known as 1/f noise , which is more aptly named 1/f scaling . Some argue that 1/f scaling is a general and pervasive property of the dynamical substrate from which cognitive functions are formed. Others argue that it is an idiosyncratic property of domain-specific processes. An experiment was conducted to investigate whether 1/f scaling pervades the intrinsic fluctuations of a spoken word. Ten participants each repeated the word bucket over 1,000 times, and fluctuations in acoustic measurements across repetitions generally followed the 1/f scaling relation, including numerous parallel yet distinct series of 1/f fluctuations. On the basis of work showing that 1/f scaling is a universal earmark of metastability, it is proposed that the observed pervasiveness of 1/f fluctuations in speech reflects the fact that cognitive functions are formed as metastable patterns of activity in brain, body, and environment.     

Strength duration curves for elegtrical stimulation of the human eye

Baumgardt's surprising report of a minimum at about 30 milliseconds in the strength-duration curve for electrical stimulation of the human eye is confirmed. Arguments are presented against his explanation of the phenomenon.

An alternative hypothesis is developed: that the complex strength-duration curve is due to the interaction of on and off processes, which are separately excited by the make and break of the current: that these processes summate when separated by 30 milliseconds but are mutually inhibitory at 70 milliseconds: that these processes are the same as those known to be aroused by light. Two new experiments are designed to test this hypothesis, and the predicted result has been obtained from each.

Experiments are devised which show that the site of stimulation is the retina.

The accuracy of the method is discussed. Over the range 10 to 100 milliseconds distortion is found to be small. For shorter pulses distortion is to be expected in all cases, and it is suggested that the chronaxie is an expression merely of the condenser effect of the tissues. The use of this term should be discontinued in connection with stimulation through the skin.

Some parallels between these results and brightness comparison experiments with light are pointed out. The nature and location of the interaction is discussed.     

Learning To Read Words

The ease with which we process the written word belies its complexities and makes it easy to forget that it is a highly skilled behaviour and one that takes time to master. In this paper, I argue that our ability to read words has its roots in our capacity for language. Good progress has been made towards understanding how children discover the systematic relationship between speech sounds and the letters used to represents those sounds, very early in reading development. However, we understand much less about how beginning readers become skilled readers. To understand this, I argue that it is important to view the visual word recognition system within the context of a broader language system, one that incorporates a rich network of semantic and episodic knowledge.     

Reading without phonology?

Responses to items such as brane are slower and/or more error prone than responses to items such as slint in lexical decision (is this string spelt like a real word?). The received view is that this “pseudohomophone” effect is attributable to phonological receding. Taft (1982) has challenged this view, offering instead a grapheme-grapheme account which assumes that graphemes that map onto a common phoneme develop the ability to activate each other without reference to phonological mediation.

Taft's grapheme-grapheme account is tested in two experiments. Experiment 1 shows that the presentation of a pseudohomophone facilitates the response to a subsequently presented word (e.g., groce-gross). Experiment 2 shows that nonword letter strings that are translatable into words by the application of putative grapheme-grapheme rules (e.g., gloce-gloss) produce no facilitation. These results are consistent with the notion of a phonological influence but inconsistent with the grapheme-grapheme account. Loci for this pseudohomophone priming effect are discussed.     

Limitations of Skinner's concept of an 'operant': A theoretical note

It is argued that even if an operant can be defined formally as the "interrelationships among S^D , R , and S ^rein", specific operants require delimitations of emitted behaviour and stimuli in terms of specific sets of contingencies of reinforcement. It is argued that the class membership of operant responses can be determined neither by reference to S^D , response topography, S^R , nor the supposed interrelationships among these, the contingencies of reinforcement. Functional analysis seems to require knowledge rejected by radical behaviourists. It is argued that operant behaviouristic analyses of human behaviour presuppose a common-sense understanding of actions, which–until explicated and shown to be reducible to a technichal behavioural language–must be taken as the point of departure in these analyses.     

EXPANDING THE CONTEXT OF UTILITY: THE STRATEGIC IMPACT OF PERSONNEL SELECTION

Others have demonstrated that traditional applications of the Brogden-Cronbach-Gleser (BCG) selection utility formula are deficient in responding to the financial context of managerial decisions (Boudreau, 1983a, 1983b; Cronshaw & Alexander, 1985, 1991). We demonstrate that traditional estimates of selection utility also fail to reflect the strategic context faced by managerial decision makers. We modify the traditional BCG model to yield an estimate of total utility derived from human resources ( U_total ) that can be directly compared to firms' strategic need at a particular point in time ( U^target )-Further, we demonstrate that, while strategic need is rarely constant over time, the capacity of a selection system to meet that need is also likely to change as r_xy and SD_y change over time. Re-examination of what is important to strategic human resource decision makers (selection utility vs. total utility and strategic need) and changing selection system contributions over time yields a more realistic view of how firms benefit from personnel selection.     

TREATING WOMEN AS SEX-OBJECTS

In this paper we have two related aims. First, we aim to present an account of what it is to treat women as sex-objects.¹ Like other philosophical writers in the field, we hold that the central idea in an account of such treatment is the failure to treat women with proper respect in sexual behavior. This idea has been cashed out in terms of using,² and in terms of dehumanization or failure to accord equal rights to freedom and welfare.³ However, we believe that there is a central deficiency in most such philosophical accounts of treating women as sex-objects, namely, a failure to outline in any detail a theory of interpersonal norms so that one can grasp in more concrete terms what it is to avoid treating a woman as a sex-object. We aim to rectify this deficiency by presenting a model of interpersonal norms based on the work of the social psychologist Chris Argyris.⁴     

Medial preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus and sexual motivation

The medial preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus (MPOA/AH) is a brain site derived from proliferative zones from the diencephalon and telencephalon. It is probably this characteristic that makes this brain region participate in different physiological and behavioral functions. The present review addresses the role of the MPOA/AH in the control of male sexual behavior. It is clear that the MPOA/AH is a crucial site in the control of sexual behavior in males of all species studied to date. But although many different publications have followed the contribution of Heimer and Larsson there is no agreement as to what is specifically the role of the MPOA/AH in sexual behavior. At least three hypotheses have been presented. The first one suggests that this brain region is involved in the consummatory aspects (execution) of sexual behavior. The second indicates that the MPOA/AH is involved in the appetitive components (motivation) of masculine sexual behavior. The third hypothesis considers that MPOA/AH neurons are involved in the regulation of consummatory and appetitive aspects of sexual behavior. From the literature reviewed, it will become evident that the evidence supporting a role of the MPOA/AH in the execution of sexual behavior is based on a number of limited studies not easy to interpret. On the other hand, several lines of evidence using a variety of methodologies support the notion that the MPOA/AH is involved in the motivational aspects of male sexual behavior.     

Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia: linguistic and conceptual factors

This study documents an unusual case of developmental synaesthesia, in which speech sounds induce an involuntary sensation of taste that is subjectively located in the mouth. JIW shows a highly structured, non-random relationship between particular combinations of phonemes (rather than graphemes) and the resultant taste, and this is influenced by a number of fine-grained phonemic properties (e.g. allophony, phoneme ordering). The synaesthesia is not found for environmental sounds. The synaesthesia, in its current form, is likely to have originated during vocabulary acquisition, since it is guided by learned linguistic and conceptual knowledge. The phonemes that trigger a given taste tend to also appear in the name of the corresponding foodstuff (e.g. /I/, /n/ and /s/ can trigger a taste of mince /mIns/) and there is often a semantic association between the triggering word and taste (e.g. the word blue tastes "inky"). The results suggest that synaesthesia does not simply reflect innate connections from one perceptual system to another, but that it can be mediated and/or influenced by a symbolic/conceptual level of representation.     

Relevance theory,pragmatic inference and cognitive architecture

Relevance Theory (RT) argues that human language comprehension processes tend to maximize “relevance,” and postulates that there is a relevance-based procedure that a hearer follows when trying to understand an utterance. Despite being highly influential, RT has been criticized for its failure to explain how speaker-related information, either the speaker’s abilities or her/his preferences, is incorporated into the hearer’s inferential, pragmatic process. An alternative proposal is that speaker-related information gains prominence due to representation of the speaker within higher level goal-directed schemata. Yet the goal-based account is still unable to explain clearly how cross-domain information, for example linguistic meaning and speaker-related knowledge, is integrated within a modular system. On the basis of RT’s cognitive requirements, together with contemporary cognitive theory, we argue that this integration is realized by utilizing working memory and that there exist conversational constraints with which the constructed utterance interpretation should be consistent. We illustrate our arguments with a computational implementation of the proposed processes within a general cognitive architecture.

Abbreviations: ACT-R Adaptive Control of Thought - RationalCOGENT Cognitive Objects within a Graphical ENvironmenTCS/SS Contention Scheduling/Supervisory SystemRBCP Relevance-Based Comprehension ProcedureRT Relevance Theory     

Stimulus Intensity and Attention in Relation to Learning Theory

Three experiments are described which test the hypothesis that the more intense of two stimuli will, ceteris paribus, be more likely to receive attention. It is assumed that an objective behavioural manifestation of attention to a given stimulus is a preference for responding to it rather than to another which is present at the same time.

In all three experiments, successions of pairs of visual stimuli interspersed with single stimuli were presented to the subject, and he was instructed to respond to either (by pressing its corresponding morsekey), but not both, in the case of the pairs. The first two experiments reveal significant tendencies to respond to the larger and the brighter stimulus respectively. In the third experiment, there was a tendency, but a statistically insignificant one, to respond to a constant rather than to a flickering stimulus.

It is shown that the attraction of attention by a more intense stimulus follows from Hull's system with the addition of his new variable, “stimulus-intensity dynamism (V),” and it is suggested that it may thus be possible to add attention to the phenomena that can be integrated with an objective behaviour theory.     

IT STICKS IN MY THROAT

In challenging the implications of my putative counter-example to Wittgenstein's claim that "It's on the tip of my tongue" (TT) is not the expression of an experience (cf. Philosophical Investigations , p.219)¹, Professor Slater writes²
… the obvious way in which to meet the threat to the adequacy of (b₁) [which is that the speaker should believe that he may be able to produce the missing word (fairly soon)] is to claim that the utterer of "It's on the tip of my tongue" must not merely believe that he may recall the word fairly soon, he must also believe, i.e., not rule out the possibility that, he may do so without any treatment , i.e., without being prompted by an external source such as cues, pills, or shock, (p.51)     

Three Twentieth-century Commonplaces about 'If'

The commonplaces, all grammatically confused, are that ‘conditionals’ are ternary in structure, have ‘antecedents’ and conform to the traditional taxonomy. It is maintained en route that ‘The bough will not break’ is consistent with ‘If the bough breaks …’, that there is no logical difference between “future indicatives” and “subjunctives”, and that there is a difference between the logic of propositions (e.g. ‘The bough broke’) and that of judgments (‘The bough will/might/could/should/must/needn't break’).