What Can Austin Tell Us about Truth?

In recent discussions of the problem of truth, Austin's views have been largely overlooked. This is unfortunate, since many of his criticisms aimed at Strawson's redundancy theory carry over to more recent incarnations of deflationism. And unlike contemporary versions of the correspondence theory of truth, Austin's manages properly to situate truth in its conceptual neighbourhood wherein it belongs to “a whole dimension of different appraisals which have something or other to do with the relation between what we say and the facts.” A proper analysis of truth cannot be given apart from a broader study of speech acts.     

What Can 1 Million Trials Tell Us about Visual Search?

In a typical visual search experiment, observers look through a set of items for a designated target that may or may not be present. Reaction time (RT) is measured as a function of the number of items in the display (set size), and inferences about the underlying search processes are based on the slopes of the resulting RT × Set Size functions. Most search experiments involve 5 to 15 subjects performing a few hundred trials each. In this retrospective study, I examine results from 2,500 experimental sessions of a few hundred trials each (approximately 1 million total trials). These data represent a wide variety of search tasks. The resulting picture of human search behavior requires changes in our theories of visual search.     

Imaginary Companions in Childhood: What Can Prospective Longitudinal Research Tell Us About Their Fate by Adolescence?

Do adolescents remember imaginary companions (ICs) from early childhood? Researchers interviewed 46 adolescent participants in a prospective longitudinal study about their ICs from early childhood (age 5½). The existence of one or more ICs was documented in early childhood for 48% of children (G. Trionfi & E. Reese, 2009). At age 16, most adolescents had forgotten their early childhood ICs: Only 5 of the 23 participants who had early childhood ICs recalled those ICs later. Eight participants who had forgotten their early childhood ICs recalled a later IC, and four participants who did not have an IC at age 5 ½ reported one by age 16. Ten of the 23 participants who had early childhood ICs claimed never to have had an IC. Girls were more likely to recall their early childhood ICs. Retrospective reports of ICs in adolescence or later life may be unreliable for investigating differences between those with and without imaginary companions. Those with ICs may not be a homogenous group, with some creating ICs throughout childhood and some desisting from this behavior in early childhood. Findings indicate that both the remembering and forgetting of ICs has potential to illuminate cognitive and creative processes surrounding both memory and imagination.     

What can Examining the Psychology of Nationalism Tell Us About Our Prospects for Aiming at the Cosmopolitan Vision?

Opponents of cosmopolitanism often dismiss the position on the grounds that cosmopolitan proposals are completely unrealistic and that they fly in the face of our human nature. We have deep psychological needs that are satisfied by national identification and so all cosmopolitan projects are doomed, or so it is argued. In this essay we examine the psychological grounds claimed to support the importance of nationalism to our wellbeing. We argue that the alleged human needs that nationalism is said to satisfy are: (i) either more complex than initially one might think or (ii) do not necessarily provide very strong grounds for the theses advocated by nationalists or (iii) can be well met in alternate ways than through national identification. Moreover, commitment to cosmopolitanism is not antithetical to meeting these needs: rather, more cosmopolitan worldviews can do quite well in meeting the needs of interest. Moreover, we argue that since nationalism is a fluid and socially constructed phenomenon, quite open to the influence of other factors, the current evidence suggests that central aspects of cosmopolitanism are quite feasible and realistic.

What Does the Frame Problem Tell us About Moral Normativity?

Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is sometimes called the relevance problem. In this paper we describe the frame problem and certain of its apparent morals concerning human cognition, and we argue that these morals have significant import regarding both the nature of moral normativity and the human capacity for mastering moral normativity. The morals of the frame problem bode well, we argue, for the claim that moral normativity is not fully systematizable by exceptionless general principles, and for the correlative claim that such systematizability is not required in order for humans to master moral normativity.

‚Mirroring‘ the Ethics of Biobanking: What Analysis of Consent Documents Can Tell Us?

Biobanks have been recognized as a key research infrastructure and how to approach ethical questions has been a topic of discussion for at least a decade by now. This article explores the characteristics of donors’ participation in European biobanks as reflected in the consent documents of a selection of different biobanks from various European countries. The primary aim of this study is to understand how donors are informed about their participation in biobanking. Also the paper discusses what the most important thematic issues of information are to be given to the biobank participants and how this information should be presented in the consent documents. For these purposes, we analyse consent documents from 14 biobanks in 11 countries for six ethically relevant issues: (1) model of consent, (2) scope of future research, (3) access to medical data, (4) feedback to the participants, (5) consent withdrawal, and (6) role of research ethics committee. In order to compare different trends of informing donors of human biological material and medical data, we interpret the six analysed issues in the context of respect to donor’s autonomy paradigm. Although the results of the paper reflect the heterogeneity of biobank consent document policies applied in different European countries, we uncovered some trends and suggested several examples of good practices to balance the interests of the donors with those of the researchers and future patients.     

What Can Spatial Deficits Teach Us About Feature Binding and Spatial Maps?

The “binding problem” is discussed with reference to feature integration and visual search. Neuropsychological and neurophysiological findings support the existence of multiple visual areas within the primate cortex that respond to primary features of objects and spatial locations. Evidence from studies with hemineglect and Balint's syndrome supports the role of spatial attention in feature integration and demonstrates the necessity for an intact, explicitspatial representation. Some implicit spatial maps remain intact but are not sufficient to support the perception of properly bound features. The evidence suggests strong interactions between parietal spatial representations and temporal feature representations in feature integration.     

Can the Mind Command the Body?

People naturally intuit that an agent's ethereal thoughts can cause its body to move. Per intuitive physics; however, one body can only interact with another. Are people, then, covertly puzzled by the capacity of thoughts to command the body? Experiment 1 first confirms that thoughts (e.g., thinking about a cup) are indeed perceived as ethereal—as less detectible in the body (brain), and more likely to exist in the afterlife relative to matched percepts (e.g., seeing a cup). Experiments 2–5 show that thoughts are considered less likely to cause behavior than percepts (e.g., thinking of a cup vs. seeing one). Furthermore, mind–body causation is more remarkable when its bodily consequences are salient (e.g., moving an arm vs. brain activation). Finally, epistemic causes are remarkable only when they are ascribed to mental- (e.g., “thinking”) but not to physical states (“activation”). Together, these results suggest that mind–body interactions elicit a latent dualist dissonance.     

What Can Experiments Reveal About the Origins of Music?

ABSTRACT— The origins of music have intrigued scholars for thousands of years. In this article I discuss the role of experiments in discussions of these issues. I argue that potentially useful kinds of evidence are those that address the innateness and the specificity of different components of musical behavior. At present there is some evidence for innate influences on music, but little evidence for capacities that are clearly specific to music. Although future experiments could potentially alter this picture, there is currently little unambiguous support for the notion that music is an adaptation.     

What Can Be Learned from the Arts About Aging?

This brief article examines some of the theoretical questions raised by aesthetics. Paintings have not only form and content, but are underpinned by philosophical principles that connect art to gerontology. We examine specific theoretical messages of a trend in art that have important implications for conceptualizing humans, including their interactions and surroundings. Three artists are used to illustrate this trend: Cezanne, Picasso, and Pollock. These and other artists of this century foster a heightened awareness of humanistic concerns. Caught between abstract reason and expert systems on the one hand, and the life worlds of older people on the other, gerontology finds itself in a place where art can speak to its deeper concerns in unique ways.     

Creativity,Originality, and Appropriateness: What do Explicit Instructions Tell Us About Their Relationships?

Originality is a necessary part of creativity, but creative things are more than just original. They also solve a problem, or more generally are somehow fitting or appropriate. Yet previous research found an inverse relationship between ratings of originality and ratings of appropriateness. The present investigation employed a different methodology — it focused on the generation of ideas instead of judgments about them — to reexamine the relationships between originality, appropriateness, and creativity. Undergraduate students (N = 170) from two large universities received either realistic or unrealistic divergent thinking tasks. These were given with one of four types of instructions. These asked them to give (a) as many ideas as possible (which is the standard type of instruction for these kinds of tests), (b) only original ideas, (c) only appropriate ideas, or (d) only creative ideas. Brief definitions of originality, appropriateness, or creativity were also provided. Comparisons of the four groups indicated that there were significant differences between the different kinds of tasks, with the realistic set eliciting more appropriate ideas than the unrealistic, but the unrealistic tasks eliciting more original and varied (flexible) ideas. There was an interaction indicating that the magnitude of the impact of the instructions varied across tasks. Correlational analyses indicated that the correlation between the originality and appropriateness scores was the lowest among all possible inter‐index relationships (only 7% shared variance). Future research and practical implications are explored.     

What Do Implicit Measures Tell Us? Scrutinizing the Validity of Three Common Assumptions

ABSTRACT— Experimental paradigms designed to assess "implicit" representations are currently very popular in many areas of psychology. The present article addresses the validity of three widespread assumptions in research using these paradigms: that (a) implicit measures reflect unconscious or introspectively inaccessible representations; (b) the major difference between implicit measures and self-reports is that implicit measures are resistant or less susceptible to social desirability; and (c) implicit measures reflect highly stable, older representations that have their roots in long-term socialization experiences. Drawing on a review of the available evidence, we conclude that the validity of all three assumptions is equivocal and that theoretical interpretations should be adjusted accordingly. We discuss an alternative conceptualization that distinguishes between activation and validation processes.     

What Can Virtual Reality Teach Us About Prosocial Tendencies in Real and Virtual Environments?

As virtual environments (VEs) become increasingly central to people's lives (Terry, 2002 Terry, F. 2002. New Media: An introduction, South Melbourne, , Australia: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar]), understanding reactions to VEs may be as important as understanding behavior in the real world (Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, & Merget, 2007 Yee, N., Bailenson, J. N., Urbanek, M., Chang, F. and Merget, D. 2007. The unbearable likeness of being digital: The persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments. The Journal of CyberPsychology and Behavior, 10: 115–121. [Crossref], [PubMed] , [Google Scholar]). Immersive Virtual Environment Technology (IVET), which is now being used in psychological research (Blascovich et al., 2002 Blascovich, J., Loomis, J., Beall, A., Swinth, K., Hoyt, C. and Bailenson, J. 2002. Immersive virtual environment technology as a research tool for social psychology. Psychological Inquiry, 13: 103–125. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), can provide greater experimental control, more precise measurement, ease of replication across participants, and high ecological validity, making it attractive for researchers. It also can create links between researchers who study basic social psychological processes and those who study new media. In two studies we examined people's reactions as they navigated through a virtual world and interacted with virtual people, some of whom needed help. Participants' compassion and tendency to experience personal distress predicted emotional reactions (concern) and proxemic behavior (gaze orientation and degree of interpersonal distance) to a virtual person in need but not to a control person. The results support the use of IVET and proxemic variables to measure compassion unobtrusively and they encourage the use of IVET to advance our understanding of people's behavior in and reactions to virtual worlds and new media.