RASP: A system for the analysis of memory tasks

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a system for the analysis of memory tasks. The system involves four basic task dimensions, derived from an ecological analysis of memory functioning: Reproductivity (R), Acquisition (A), Sufficiency (S), and Productivity (P). Three studies are reported in which professional memory psychologists were asked to rate sets of standard laboratory and more ecologically relevant memory tasks in terms of the four RASP dimensions. In general, results implied independence across the two sets of tasks between the four dimensions. Interrater reliabilities were found to be modest to high. However, it was suggested that RASP best be used as a tool for understanding the meaningful relations that exist among dimensions within general sets or pools of tasks, for different classes of tasks, as well as for prototypical tasks. We argue that, especially when the relationship between RASP profiles for two particular tasks is crossvalidated by behavioral data, and conflict with assumptions about what memory systems or processes are involved, then there is a potential for conceptual refinement. This refinement could be attained either through an increased theoretical generalization, or through an increased theoretical precision. Based on obtained RASP information at the level of classes of tasks (e.g., episodic vs. semantic) as well as at a prototypical task level (e.g., word recall vs. prose recall), several intriguing memory phenomena are discussed. Finally, we suggest that RASP may serve as a tool for reducing the number of task-specific assumptions of what systems and processes mediate memory performance.     

A unitary signal-detection model of implicit and explicit memory

Do dissociations imply independent systems? In the memory field, the view that there are independent implicit and explicit memory systems has been predominantly supported by dissociation evidence. Here, we argue that many of these dissociations do not necessarily imply distinct memory systems. We review recent work with a single-system computational model that extends signal-detection theory (SDT) to implicit memory. SDT has had a major influence on research in a variety of domains. The current work shows that it can be broadened even further in its range of application. Indeed, the single-system model that we present does surprisingly well in accounting for some key dissociations that have been taken as evidence for independent implicit and explicit memory systems.     

Respect for the Dignity of People: What Does This Principle Mean in Practice?

Researchers have found that disrespectful behaviour can have a notable psychological impact on victims and observers thereof. It is not surprising, therefore, that law and all the major psychology codes of ethics acknowledge the principle of respect for the dignity of persons. The practical implications of this principle, however, are not clear. In this article we argue, with reference to the philosophical roots of the principle, that there are rules of manners in all societies that describe how people should demonstrate respect for persons. Generally, the profession cannot require psychologists to adhere to the rules of manners, not even those that demonstrate respect for persons, but it can, and does, prescribe to psychologists how they should act while they practice as psychologists. We proceed to examine the principles and standards of the Australian Psychology Society's Code of Ethics (2007) that require psychologists to demonstrate respect for persons while acting as psychologists.     

Anthropomorphism and anthropectomy as friendly competitors

Principles help comparative psychologists select from among multiple hypotheses that account for the data. Anthropomorphic principles select hypotheses that have the most human–animal similarities while anthropectic principles select hypotheses that have the most human–animal differences. I argue that there is no way for the comparative psychologist on their own to justify their selection of one principle over the other. However, the comparative psychologist can justify their selection of one principle over the other in virtue of being members of comparative psychology as a community. As it turns out, though, this justifies both competing principles: the community benefits most from competition between the two principles so comparative psychologists are justified in implementing the principles by which they can best contribute to the competition. Thus, I argue that common arguments to unify principle implementation in comparative psychology are defeated by the conservative arguments to preserve and foster competition.     

Turning up the volume on the property view of sound

In the present article, I show that sounds are properties that are not physical in a narrow sense. First, I argue that sounds are properties using Moorean-style arguments and defend this property view from various arguments against it that make use of salient disanalogies between sounds and colors. The first disanalogy is that we talk of objects making sounds but not of objects making colors. The second is that we count and quantify over sounds but not colors. The third is that sounds can survive qualitative change in their auditory properties, but colors cannot survive change in their chromatic properties. Next, I provide a taxonomy of property views of sound. As the property view of sound has been so rarely discussed, many of the views available have never been articulated. My taxonomy will articulate these views and how they are related to one another. I taxonomize sounds according to three characteristics: dispositional/non-dispositional, relational/non-relational and reductive/non-reductive. Finally, mirroring a popular argument in the color literature, I argue that physical views in the narrow sense are unable to accommodate the similarity and difference relations in which sounds essentially stand. I end replying to three objections.     

The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?

In a dynamic world, mechanisms allowing prediction of future situations can provide a selective advantage. We suggest that memory systems differ in the degree of flexibility they offer for anticipatory behavior and put forward a corresponding taxonomy of prospection. The adaptive advantage of any memory system can only lie in what it contributes for future survival. The most flexible is episodic memory, which we suggest is part of a more general faculty of mental time travel that allows us not only to go back in time, but also to foresee, plan, and shape virtually any specific future event. We review comparative studies and find that, in spite of increased research in the area, there is as yet no convincing evidence for mental time travel in nonhuman animals. We submit that mental time travel is not an encapsulated cognitive system, but instead comprises several subsidiary mechanisms. A theater metaphor serves as an analogy for the kind of mechanisms required for effective mental time travel. We propose that future research should consider these mechanisms in addition to direct evidence of future-directed action. We maintain that the emergence of mental time travel in evolution was a crucial step towards our current success.     

Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition

The prominence of Bayesian modeling of cognition has increased recently largely because of mathematical advances in specifying and deriving predictions from complex probabilistic models. Much of this research aims to demonstrate that cognitive behavior can be explained from rational principles alone, without recourse to psychological or neurological processes and representations. We note commonalities between this rational approach and other movements in psychology - namely, Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology - that set aside mechanistic explanations or make use of optimality assumptions. Through these comparisons, we identify a number of challenges that limit the rational program's potential contribution to psychological theory. Specifically, rational Bayesian models are significantly unconstrained, both because they are uninformed by a wide range of process-level data and because their assumptions about the environment are generally not grounded in empirical measurement. The psychological implications of most Bayesian models are also unclear. Bayesian inference itself is conceptually trivial, but strong assumptions are often embedded in the hypothesis sets and the approximation algorithms used to derive model predictions, without a clear delineation between psychological commitments and implementational details. Comparing multiple Bayesian models of the same task is rare, as is the realization that many Bayesian models recapitulate existing (mechanistic level) theories. Despite the expressive power of current Bayesian models, we argue they must be developed in conjunction with mechanistic considerations to offer substantive explanations of cognition. We lay out several means for such an integration, which take into account the representations on which Bayesian inference operates, as well as the algorithms and heuristics that carry it out. We argue this unification will better facilitate lasting contributions to psychological theory, avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued previous theoretical movements.     

What Differentiates Declarative and Procedural Memories: Reply to Cohen,Poldrack, and Eichenbaum (1997)

Cohen, Poldrack, and Eichenbaum (1997; hereafter CPE) offer an account of the nature of individual items in memory and how they relate to one another. They argue that there are two separate memory systems, procedural and declarative (Cohen & Eichenbaum, 1993; Cohen & Squire, 1980). These systems differ in their neuroanatomic substrates, in their operating characteristics, and in the nature of the representations they use. CPE argue that representations in the declarative memory system are compositional, meaning that declarative representations may be composed of other declarative representations. Declarative memories are also flexible, meaning they can be accessed in contexts that differ from those in which they were encoded. Procedural memories, on the other hand, are neither compositional nor flexible. I will argue that there is not sufficient reason to argue that procedural and declarative memories have these distinct characteristics. Both procedural and declarative memories are arguably compositional, and both can appear flexible or inflexible, depending on testing conditions.     

Untangling the Theory of Planned Behavior's auxiliary assumptions and theoretical assumptions: Implications for predictive and intervention studies

It has been asserted that the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) is better at behavioral prediction than it is behavioral change. However, the performance of a theory depends not only on the theoretical propositions, but the auxiliary assumptions attached to the theory. It is because of such auxiliary assumptions, which are required to bridge the gap between nonobservational terms at the level of theory and the observational terms at the level of the empirical hypothesis, that we believe critiques of the TPB's utility are misguided. We argue that a failure to separate theoretical assumptions from auxiliary assumptions leads to this false assumption. We suggest the importance of distinguishing between the auxiliary assumptions required for prediction studies and the auxiliary assumptions required for intervention studies. We believe that in attaching sound auxiliary assumptions to intervention studies, the TPB is equally effective at facilitating behavior change as it is behavior prediction.     

任务规律性对前瞻记忆的影响

采用混合实验设计,结合行为和眼动数据,探讨任务规律性对前瞻记忆的影响。行为结果显示规律已知条件下前瞻记忆成绩显著高于规律未知和无规律条件,规律未知条件下的前瞻记忆成绩在靶线索之后刺激上有高于无规律条件的趋势;眼动结果显示规律已知条件下的注视点最多,首次注视时间最长。结果说明:(1)任务规律性对前瞻记忆成绩具有促进作用;(2)任务规律性促进了对前瞻记忆任务的自动化加工;(3)在规律已知条件下前瞻记忆的加工过程呈现出动态交替的特点。     

What Dennett can't imagine and why

Woven into Dennett's account of consciousness is his belief that certain possibilities are not conceivable. This is manifested in his view that we are not conscious in any sense in which we can imagine that philosophers’ ‘zombies’ might not be conscious, and also in his claims about ‘Hindsight’, and what possibilities this can coherently suggest to us. If the possibilities Dennett denies none the less seem conceivable to us, then if he does not give us reason to think they are actually incoherent, we ought to reject his theory, since it denies the intelligibility of the very notion we should want a theory of consciousness to discuss. I argue that Dennett does not provide us with convincing reasons of the relevant sort, and I suggest that his difficulty with the concept of consciousness is rooted in questionable epistemological assumptions which he fails to justify.     

Women, men, work, and family. An expansionist theory.

The lives of women and men, the relationships that they establish, and their work have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, but the dominant theories driving research in these areas have not. In this article, the authors argue that the facts underlying the assumptions of the classical theories of gender and multiple roles have changed so radically as to make the theories obsolete. Moreover, a large body of empirical data fails to support the predictions flowing from these theories. Yet the development of new theory for guiding research and clinical practice has not kept pace. The authors attempt to fill this theoretical gap by reviewing the research literature and articulating an expansionist theory of gender, work, and family that includes four empirically derived and empirically testable principles better matched to today's realities.     

Is perception informationally encapsulated? The issue of the theory‐ladenness of perception

Fodor has argued that observation is theory neutral, since the perceptual systems are modular, that is, they are domain-specific, encapsulated, mandatory, fast, hard-wired in the organism, and have a fixed neural architecture. Churchland attacks the theoretical neutrality of observation on the grounds that (a) the abundant top-down pathways in the brain suggest the cognitive penetration of perception and (b) perceptual learning can change in the wiring of the perceptual systems. In this paper I introduce a distinction between sensation, perception, and observation and I argue that although Churchland is right that observation involves top-down processes, there is also a substantial amount of information in perception which is theory-neutral. I argue that perceptual learning does not threaten the cognitive impenetrability of perception, and that the neuropsychological research does not provide evidence in favor of the top-down character of perception. Finally, I discuss the possibility of an off-line cognitive penetrability of perception.     

What if you went to the police and accused your uncle of abuse? Misunderstandings concerning the benefits of memory distortion: A commentary on

In a recent paper, Fernández (2015) argues that memory distortion can have beneficial outcomes. Although we agree with this, we find his reasoning and examples flawed to such degree that they will lead to misunderstandings rather than clarification in the field of memory (distortion). In his paper, Fernández uses the terms belief and memory incorrectly, creating a conceptual blur. Also, Fernández tries to make the case that under certain circumstances, false memories of abuse are beneficial. We argue against this idea as the reasoning behind this claim is based on controversial assumptions such as repression. Although it is true that memory distortions can be beneficial, the examples sketched by Fernández are not in line with recent documentation in this area.     

Why concepts can't be theories

In this paper, I present an alternative argument for Jerry Fodor's recent conclusion that there are currently no tenable theories of concepts in the cognitive sciences and in the philosophy of mind. Briefly, my approach focuses on the ‘theory-theory’ of concepts. I argue that the two ways in which cognitive psychologists have formulated this theory lead to serious difficulties, and that there cannot be, in principle, a third way in which it can be reformulated. Insofar as the ‘theory-theory’ is supposed to replace, and to rectify the problems of, the earlier ‘classical’ and ‘probabilistic’ theories, its failure confirms Fodor's original observation. Since my critique does not rest on controversial philosophical assumptions and is readily available from within the cognitive sciences, it is a stronger argument than Fodor's.     

Priming Effects and Free Will

Abstract

I argue that the empirical literature on priming effects does not warrant nor suggest the conclusion, drawn by prominent psychologists such as J. A. Bargh, that we have no free will or less free will than we might think. I focus on a particular experiment by Bargh – the ‘elderly’ stereotype case in which subjects that have been primed with words that remind them of the stereotype of the elderly walk on average slower out of the experiment’s room than control subjects – and I show that we cannot say that subjects cannot help walking slower or that they are not free in doing do. I then illustrate how these cases can be reconciled and normalized within a Davidsonian theory of action to show that, in walking slower, subjects are acting intentionally. My argument applies across various experiments, including those of goal priming. In the final section I argue that the only cases in which priming effects are efficacious are so-called Buridan cases.     

The Value of Symbolic Computation

Standard generative linguistic theory, which uses discrete symbolic models of cognition, has some strengths and weaknesses. It is strong on providing a network of outposts that make scientific travel in the jungles of natural language feasible. It is weak in that it currently depends on the elaborate and unformalized use of intuition to develop critical supporting assumptions about each data point. In this regard, it is not in a position to characterize natural language systems in the lawful terms that ecological psychologists strive for. Connectionist learning models offer some help: They define lawful relations between linguistic environments and language systems. But our understanding of them is currently weak, especially when it comes to natural language syntax. Fortunately, symbolic linguistic analysis can help connectionism if the two meet via dynamical systems theory. I discuss a case in point: Insights from linguistic explorations of natural language syntax appear to have identified information structures that are particularly relevant to understanding ecologically appealing but analytically mysterious connectionist learning models.     

Reply to Panel Questions

This commentary on papers by Neil Altman and Rachel Peltz argues that while the type of political culture in which one lives has a significant impact on the practice of psychoanalysis, no direct line can be drawn from psychoanalytic theory to any particular political persuasion. It is one thing to argue that psychoanalytic insights offer a way of thinking about political relations; it is quite another to suggest that they can be used to promote or justify a political agenda. While Altman and Peltz theorize about the negative impact of manic defense in contemporary culture, this commentary suggests that there are natural fluctuations in one's ability to respect inner reality and a degree of manic defense employed in everyday life that is quite normal. We all use reality to gain reassurance against death inside. But, when we are “distracted from distraction by distraction” (Eliot, 1971, p. 120) external objects are prematurely deadened so that the needed reassurance through external reality becomes increasingly elusive. Challenging some of Altman and Peltz's political assumptions, the commentary suggests that if psychoanalysis is to contribute to the political realm, it must do so on the basis of how it differs from other approaches to understanding what it means to be a human being.