If we compute faster, do we understand better?

Practitioners of cognitive science, “theoretical” neuroscience, and psychology have made less use of high-performance computing for testing theories than have those in many other areas of science. Why is this? In high-performance scientific computation, potentially billions of operations must lead to a trustable conclusion. Technical problems with the stability of algorithms aside, this requirement also places extremely rigorous constraints on the accuracy of the underlying theory. For example, electromagnetic interactions seem to hold accurately from atomic to galactic scales. Large-scale computations using elementary principles are possible and useful. Many have commented that the behavioral and neural sciences are largely pretheoretical. One consequence is that we cannot trust our few theories to scale well for a very good reason: They don’t. We have some quite good computational theories for single neurons and some large-scale aspects of behavior seem to be surprisingly lawful. However, we have little idea about how to go from the behavior of a single neuron to the behavior of the 10¹¹ neurons involved when the brain actually does something. Neural networks have offered one potential way to leap this enormous gap in scale, since many elementary units cooperate in a neural network computation. As currently formulated, however, neural networks seem to lack essential mechanisms that are required for flexible control of the computation, and they also neglect structure at intermediate scales of organization. We will present some speculations related to controllability and scaling in neural networks.     

Personality,pupils, and purple cows: we have the right answers,but do we have the right questions?

In this article, I consider first the questions about the relation between personality and education that we have, to a large extent, answered, and then the questions that we have yet to answer, and, in large part, even to ask.     

Whose voice are we hearing,really?

This article, written from the position of someone who has lived experience of therapy for ‘psychosis’ and an interest in participation, explores the degree to which qualitative research truly conveys the voice and perspective of research participants. By exploring five papers focused on diverse experiences of psychotherapy, from the perspective of clients and therapists, it draws out some of the tensions inherent in making interpretations and connections within research papers and the impact this may have on the quality of any conclusions drawn. Finally, it makes some suggestions for ways of meaningfully involving research participants in the process and argues for an ongoing dialogue to prevent our own assumptions and theoretical frameworks from obscuring the importance of this involvement to improve the quality of future research.     

How do we know what we are doing? Time, intention and awareness of action

Time is a fundamental dimension of consciousness. Many studies of the "sense of agency" have investigated whether we attribute actions to ourselves based on a conscious experience of intention occurring prior to action, or based on a reconstruction after the action itself has occurred. Here, we ask the same question about a lower level aspect of action experience, namely awareness of the detailed spatial form of a simple movement. Subjects reached for a target, which unpredictably jumped to the side on some trials. Participants (1) expressed their expectancy of a target shift during the upcoming movement, (2) pointed at the target as quickly and accurately as possible before returning to the start posiment to the target shift if required and (3) reproduced the spatial path of the movement they had just made, as accurately as possible, to give an indication of their awareness of the pointing movement. We analysed the spatial disparity between the initial and the reproduced movements on those with a target shift. A negative disparity value, or undershoot, suggests that motor awareness merely reflects a sluggish record of coordinated motor performance, while a positive value, or overshoot, suggests that participants' intention to point to the shifting target contributes more to their awareness of action than their actual pointing movement. Undershoot and overshoot thus measure the reconstructive (motoric) and the preconstuctive (intentional) aspects of action awareness, respectively. We found that trials on which subjects strongly expected a target shift showed greater overshoot and less undershoot than trials with lower expectancy. Conscious expectancy therefore strongly influences the experience of the detailed motor parameters of our actions. Further, a delay inserted either between the expectancy judgement and the pointing movement, or between the pointing movement and the reproduction of the movement, had no effect on visuomotor adjustment but strongly influenced action awareness. Delays during either interval boosted undershoots, suggesting increased reliance on a time-limited sensory memory for action. The experience of action is thus strongly influenced by prior thoughts and expectations, but only over a short time period. Thus, awareness of our actions is a dynamic and relatively flexible mixture of what we intend to do, and what our motor system actually does.     

So, are we the massively lucky species?

We are in vehement agreement with most of Vaesen's key claims. But Vaesen fails to consider or rebut the possibility that there are deep causal dependencies among the various cognitive traits he identifies as uniquely human. We argue that "higher-order relational reasoning" is one such linchpin trait in the evolution of human tool use, social intelligence, language, and culture.     

Unification: What is it,how do we Reach and why do we Want it?

This article has three aims. The first is to give a partial explication of the concept of unification. My explication will be partial because I confine myself to unification of particular events, because I do not consider events of a quantitative nature, and discuss only deductive cases. The second aim is to analyze how unification can be reached. My third aim is to show that unification is an intellectual benefit. Instead of being an intellectual benefit unification could be an intellectual harm, i.e., a state of mind we should try to avoid by all means. By calling unification an intellectual benefit, we claim that this form of understanding has an intrinsic value for us. I argue that unification really has this alleged intrinsic value. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Science, ethnicity, and bias: where have we gone wrong?

The quality, quantity, and funding of ethnic minority research have been inadequate. One factor that has contributed to this inadequacy is the practice of scientific psychology. Although principles of psychological science involve internal and external validity, in practice psychology emphasizes internal validity in research studies. Because many psychological principles and measures have not been cross-validated with different populations, those conducting ethnic minority research often have a more difficult time demonstrating rigorous internal validity. Thus, psychology's overemphasis of internal as opposed to external validity has differentially hindered the development of ethnic minority research. To develop stronger research knowledge on ethnic minority groups, it is important that (a) all research studies address external validity issues and explicitly specify the populations to which the findings are applicable; (b) different research approaches, including the use of qualitative and ethnographic methods, be appreciated; and (c) the psychological meaning of ethnicity or race be examined in ethnic comparisons.     

Must we measure what we mean?

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper, I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are (at least sometimes) engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success.     

Honestly, do we need a policy on truth?

Physicians are taught that the foundation of the physician-patient relationship is trust, and trust is based in part on truthfulness. While drawing important "lines in the sand" regarding whether and why to tell the truth, ethics codes promulgating honesty fail to provide clinicians with guidance regarding what is the truth, as well as when and how to disclose it. These issues may be at the core of why an adverse event is left undisclosed. Consistently being truthful in the setting of an error is particularly difficult and requires overcoming a number of institutional and personal barriers. The article concludes that if delivering "the truth" is important, then articulation of criteria for determining what should be told, by whom, and when is essential. A policy that considers the practical issues and provides guidance may be useful.     

Can we trust the phenomenological interview? Metaphysical,epistemological, and methodological objections

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less...     

Are we born and do we die?

The stranglehold on our imagination by the mind-body dualisms that permeate the culture is such that most people seem to suppose that "body" and "soul" name distinct and separable entities. Resisting such dualisms in favour of an old-fashioned Aristotelean view of the soul as the form of the body, this essay considers two questions: do human parents produce human beings, and do human beings die? The doctrine of the special creation of the individual soul seems to require us to answer the first question in the negative because, according to this doctrine, parents only produce matter for the God-given soul to form. As to the second, many people seem to suppose that human beings do not die, only their bodies do. Arguing against the view that immortality is a natural property of human minds, the essay suggests (with the help of Joseph Ratzinger) that, whether we speak of "immortality" or of "resurrection", life from death is neither nature, nor achievement, but gift.     

United we win,divided we fail? Effects of cognitive merger representations and performance feedback on merging groups

Research has shown that cognitive representations of mergers influence intergroup evaluations. This paper extends this research by studying how cognitive representations of mergers (one group, dual identity, and two groups) interact with performance feedback (success and failure) to affect intergroup evaluations. Two competing hypotheses were tested, which made different predictions in case of superordinate group salience combined with subgroup salience after merger failure: The subgroup‐salience‐hypothesis predicts that subgroup salience during a merger generally results in pre‐merger ingroup bias toward the pre‐merger outgroup (i.e., two groups and dual identity). The superordinate‐ salience‐hypothesis predicts that subgroup salience only results in pre‐merger ingroup bias if superordinate group salience is low (i.e., two groups). Both hypotheses predict low levels of ingroup bias after merger success. Study 1 confirmed the second hypothesis using a 3 (merger representation: one group, dual identity, and two groups) × 2 (merger feedback: failure and success) design with interacting groups. Study 2 replicated the results in an adapted minimal group paradigm. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Will we be harmed,will it be severe,can we protect ourselves? Threat appraisals predict collective angst (and its consequences)

Across four studies, we applied the cognitive model of anxiety to explicate the appraisals that elicit collective angst (i.e., concern for the in‐group's future vitality). In Study 1a, consistent with the model, Québécois experienced collective angst when they appraised the following: (1) a threat as likely to harm their group, (2) a threat as severely harming their group, and (3) Québécois as not having efficacy to protect their group. In Study 1b, results were replicated in the context of the realistic threat that Islamic extremists pose to Christian‐Lebanese. In Studies 2a and 2b, we manipulated the three appraisals and found a similar pattern of results in the context of a potential terrorist attack on American soil by Islamic extremists. Importantly, collective angst mediated the threat appraisal effect on (non‐Muslim) Americans' prejudice towards Muslims. The utility of the appraisal model for regulating collective angst (and thus its consequences) is discussed.     

What is conditionalization,and why should we do it?

Philosophical Studies - Conditionalization is one of the central norms of Bayesian epistemology. But there are a number of competing formulations, and a number of arguments that purport to...