Comment on “Retention Characteristics of Motor Short-Term Memory Cues”

Marteniuk (1973) used negative results, which may be attributed to a lack of power, to question the adequacy of variable error as a measure of forgetting. He also used these negative results, along with constant error results which were consistent with the Laabs (1971, 1973) model of motor memory, to reject parts of the model related to variable error. Caution is advised when interpreting negative results and interchanging dependent measures.     

Comment on “The Angry Patient”

This article formulates the main problem of the angry patient treated by Dr. Curtis as one of poor ego functioning. This is possibly of neuropsychological origin. Treatment would be training to strengthen ego functions and the patient–therapist relationship would be task oriented. The anger is not dealt with directly except as it interferes with the training. It is predicted that as the ego becomes stronger, the anger will become more controllable. There is some question of whether this patient would be able to cooperate with such a program.     

Comment on the Paper “Impasse-able”

In this discussion, certain aspects of the treatment of a severely disturbed patient are considered: (a) the temptation on the part of the analyst to “take sides” against the perverse influence of a pathological organization; (b) the necessity for the analyst to experience, not just understand, the crisis of the patient; and (c) the need for shameless openness in addressing shame states.     

Comment on “Nudges and Cultural Variance”

In this brief commentary, I suggest Selinger and Whyte are essentially correct in their criticism of the Nudge approach advocated by Thaler and Sunstein. I use some examples from road behavior and traffic planning to amplify the criticism that the simple behavioral economics approach fails to take account of the embedding of humans and technology in the wider social and cultural context.     

Comment on “Realizing Love and Justice”

This is a comment on the article “Realizing Love and Justice” by Martha Saunders and Kathleen Martindale that appeared in Hypatia's Fall, 1992 Special Issue on Lesbian Philosophy.     

Comment on Paul Boghossian, “What is inference”

This is a response to Paul Boghossian’s paper: What is inference? (doi:10.1007/s11098-012-9903-x). The paper and the abstract originate from a symposium at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA in San Diego in April 2011. John Broome was a co-commentator.     

Comment on “Correspondence analysis used complementary to loglinear analysis”

In van der Heijden and de Leeuw (1985) it was proposed to use loglinear analysis to detect interactions in a multiway contingency table, and to explore the form of these interactions with correspondence analysis. After performing the exploratory phase of the analysis, we will show here how the results found in this phase can be used for confirmation.This research was conducted while the authors were visiting the Laboratoire de Statistique et Probabilité, Universite Paul Sabatier, Toulouse. This visit was partly made possible by a joint grant of the Netherlands Organisation for the Advancement of Pure Research (Z.W.O.) and the French National Center for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.). For helpful comments, the authors are indebted to H. Caussinus, J. de Leeuw, and two anonymous reviewers.     

Comment on Levy's “an empirical comparison of the Z-variance and Box-Scheffé tests for homogeneity of variance”

An alternative selection of subsample sizes for the Box-Scheffé test is compared to the singlem used in Levy, An empirical comparison of the Z-variance and Box-Scheffé tests for homogeneity of variance. Use of the alternative subsample sizes is shown to suggest greater power for the Box-Scheffé test, although the test would still be less powerful than the Z-variance test. Because of the nonrobustness of the Z-variance test and the robustness of the Box-Scheffé test, the latter is recommended as a general technique unless an experimenter has assurance that all populations in the experiment are normal. Alternative techniques are also considered.The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U. S. Civil Service Commission.     

The effect of foregrounding on readers’ use of predictive inferences

This research extends previous attempts to determine whether subjects make predictive inferences during comprehension. For example, when subjects read a passage about someone falling out of a 14th-story window, do they infer that the person is dead? Previous research in which lexical decision, word naming, and recognition tasks have been used for detecting predictive inferences has had mixed results. In experiment 1, a word-stem completion task was used to test for predictive inferences. The word stems were formed from target inferences that followed either priming or control passages. The data revealed that predictive inferences are generated only about concepts that are foregrounded in the passages. In Experiments 2 and 3, lexical decision and naming were used to test for predictive inferences. The lexical decision data replicated the word-stem completion data. A control experiment ruled out a simple context-checking explanation for the lexical decision results. The naming data indicated that this tasks was not sensitive to elaborative inference generation. Theresults show that readers make predictive inferences, but do so selectively.