Coordinating mathematical concepts with the demands of authority: children’s reasoning about conventional and second-order logical rules

Arithmetic algorithms include two types of rules: conventional rules that may be changed by authority, and may legitimately vary from one classroom or country to another (e.g. putting the sum below, rather than above, the numbers added) and logical rules that involve the logic of the algorithm. Changes in the logical rules produce incorrect answers. Hence these rules are not legitimately alterable by authority. Second-order logical rules depend on the particular conventions of the symbol system used (e.g. the rule for carrying in place-value addition). Given the symbol system used, these rules are not legitimately alterable by authority. However, as a result of their dependence on the symbol system, children may have difficulty distinguishing second-order logical rules from conventional rules. Ninety-eight children in grades 2 through 5 were interviewed about the correctness of answers obtained using alternatives to standard conventional and second-order logical rules, and about the legitimacy of authorities to change the rules. Half the children across this age range treated second-order logical rules as somewhat like conventions, judging that an answer resulting from an alternative to a second-order logical rule is correct if sanctioned by authority. With increasing age children increasingly limited the jurisdiction of authority over second-order logical rules.     

Rationality,reasoning and rules: reflections on Broome’s rationality through reasoning

Philosophical Studies - The paper provides a critical discussion of some key aspects of John Broome’s theories of rationality, reasoning and the relations between them.     

Development of children’s ability to detect kinship through facial resemblance

Facial features appear to be a prominent kinship cue for ascribing relatedness among human individuals. Although there is evidence that adults can detect kinship in unrelated and unfamiliar individual’s faces, it remains to be seen whether people already possess the ability when they are young. To further understand the development of this skill, we explored children’s ability to detect parent-offspring resemblance in unrelated and unfamiliar faces. To this end, we tested approximately 140 children, aged 5–11, in two photo-matching tasks. We used a procedure that asked them to match one neonate’s face to one of three adults’ faces (Task 1), or to match one adult’s face to one of three neonate’s faces (Task 2). Our findings reveal asymmetrical performance, depending on the tasks assigned (performance of Task 2 is stronger than for Task 1), and on the sex of individuals who made up the parent-offspring pair (male parents are better matched with neonates than female parents, and boys are better matched than girls). The picture that emerges from our study is, on one hand, that the ability to detect kinship is already present at the age of five but continues to improve as one gets older, and on the other, that perception of parent-offspring facial resemblance varies according to the appraisers’ characteristics.     

Journey to transcendence: Dostoevsky’s theological polyphony in Barth’s understanding of the Pauline KRISIS

Anticipating Mikhail Bakhtin’s appreciation for the unfinalizability of Fedor Dostoevskij’s universe, prominent Protestant theologian Karl Barth celebrates the Russian novelist’s presentation of “the impenetrable ambiguity of human life” characteristic of both the ending of Dostoevsky’s novels and Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Barth’s unique reading of The Brothers Karamazov not only demonstrates the barrenness of the “theocratic dream” but also complements Bakhtin’s discussion of polyphony with an explicitly theological dimension by focusing on the dialogue between Creator and the created. Dostoevsky’s prophetic voice provides Barth with a poetic expression of the divine command that highlights the ethical dimension inherent in every theological choice.     

A new performance-based measure of children’s socioemotional understanding: Psychometric properties of the domino test for socioemotional understanding (DOTSEMU)

Preschoolers were tested on a variety of oddity problems—that is, problems where one object in a set of four differed from the other three on one dimension. These dimensions consisted of colour, size, or form. The children were most accurate on size oddity problems in which one object was bigger than the others. They were almost as accurate on colour oddity problems. Form problems were next, and size oddity problems wherein the odd object was smaller than the other three objects were next. These decalages are interpretable in terms of relational complexity theory and executive function.     

Young children’s analogical reasoning across cultures: Similarities and differences

A cross-cultural comparison between U.S. and Hong Kong preschoolers examined factors responsible for young children’s analogical reasoning errors. On a scene analogy task, both groups had adequate prerequisite knowledge of the key relations, were the same age, and showed similar baseline performance, yet Chinese children outperformed U.S. children on more relationally complex problems. Children from both groups were highly susceptible to choosing a perceptual or semantic distractor during reasoning when one was present. Taken together, these similarities and differences suggest that (a) cultural differences can facilitate better knowledge representations by allowing more efficient processing of relationally complex problems and (b) inhibitory control is an important factor in explaining the development of children’s analogical reasoning.     

Young children and spirituality: understanding children’s connectedness in a group music class

In a fast-paced materialistic world, it is important to create opportunities for spirituality in early childhood music education, a developmental element often neglected in the scholarly literature. The purpose of the present hermeneutic phenomenological study is to understand the meanings that children ascribe to their experiences of connectedness in a group music class for 15 children, aged 4–5 years, at a nursery school in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Data were collected by means of interviews, close observations, diaries and drawings. In a qualitative data analysis, the following themes emerged regarding the children’s experiences in the music class: Music is the best; My body dances; Music takes me places; We can play together; You and me; I feel better and You can have mine. Music group classes in early childhood education could be useful in creating opportunities for spiritual experiences, promoting connectedness and consequently fostering children’s spiritual well-being.     

‘No fair, copycat!’: what children’s response to plagiarism tells us about their understanding of ideas

Adults believe that plagiarizing ideas is wrong, which requires an understanding that others can have ideas and that it is wrong to copy them. In order to test when this understanding emerges, we investigated when children begin to think plagiarism is wrong. In Study 1, children aged 7, 9 and 11 years old, as well as adults, disliked someone who plagiarized compared to someone who drew an original drawing or someone who drew an identical picture by chance. Study 2 investigated the same question with younger children, focusing on children aged 3–6 years old. Children aged 5–6 years old evaluated plagiarizers negatively relative to unique drawers, but 3–4-year-olds did not. Study 3 replicated the findings from Study 2 and found that children justify their negative evaluations of plagiarizers by mentioning concerns over copying. These experiments provide evidence that, by age 5 years old, children understand that others have ideas and dislike the copying of these ideas.     

When is a question not answered? The understanding of young children of utterances violating or conforming to the rules of conversational sequencing

Knowledge of the conventional rules of conversational sequencing enables a speaker or listener to evaluate the pragmatic use of an utterance. This study explored young children's ability to discriminate among utterances that violated or conformed to these rules (Experiment 1), and ability to explain rule violations (Experiment 2). In both experiments children were read short episodes containing utterances that conformed to the rules in that the utterances were used appropriately in the episodic context of utterance, or utterances that violated the conversational rules of contingency, relevance, or informativeness. In Experiment 1, kindergarten, and first- and second-grade children (5, 6, and 7 years of age) were asked to discriminate among the conforming and rule violating utterances by assigning each utterance to one of two female conventional and unconventional speakers. The results showed that the first and second graders, but not the kindergarten children, generally discriminated among the utterances. In Experiment 2, first and third graders (6 and 8 years of age) were asked to explain the rule violations. The results showed that only the third graders consistently generated correct explanations. These results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent in deliberately violating a rule by 6 or 7 years of age, but do not correctly infer that intent until they are 8 or 9 years old.     

Does valence matter? Effects of negativity on children’s early understanding of the truth and lies

Early deceptive behavior often involves acts of wrongdoings on the part of children. As a result, it has often been assumed, although not tested directly, that children are better at identifying lies about wrongdoing than lies about other activities. We tested this assumption in two studies. In Study 1, 67 3- to 5-year-olds viewed vignettes in which a character truthfully or falsely claimed to have committed a good or bad act. Children were biased to label claims that the character had committed a good act as the truth and claims that the character had committed a bad act as lies. In Study 2, 51 4- to 6-year-olds viewed vignettes in which characters either admitted or denied committing a good or bad act. Children were better at identifying truth-tellers and liars when the acts were good. Results suggest that young children initially overgeneralize the concept of lie to include all negative acts and the concept of the truth to include all good acts and only gradually make a distinction between act valence and honesty. As a result, including wrongdoing in scenarios to test children's early understanding of the meaning of lying is likely to underestimate children's abilities.     

Development of the Brain’s Functional Network Architecture

A full understanding of the development of the brain’s functional network architecture requires not only an understanding of developmental changes in neural processing in individual brain regions but also an understanding of changes in inter-regional interactions. Resting state functional connectivity MRI (rs-fcMRI) is increasingly being used to study functional interactions between brain regions in both adults and children. We briefly review methods used to study functional interactions and networks with rs-fcMRI and how these methods have been used to define developmental changes in network functional connectivity. The developmental rs-fcMRI studies to date have found two general properties. First, regional interactions change from being predominately anatomically local in children to interactions spanning longer cortical distances in young adults. Second, this developmental change in functional connectivity occurs, in general, via mechanisms of segregation of local regions and integration of distant regions into disparate subnetworks.     

On people’s understanding of the diagnostic implications of probabilistic data

Two lines of prior research into the conditions under which people seek information are examined in light of two statistical definitions of diagnosticity. Five experiments are reported. In two, subjects selected information in order to test a hypothesis. In the remaining three, they selected information in order to convince someone else of the truth of a known hypothesis. A total of 567 university students served as subjects. The two primary conclusions were as follows: (1) When the task is highly structured by the environment, subjects select information diagnostically, and (2) when the task is less structured, so that subjects must seek relevant information not manifest, they select information pseudodiagnostically. Possible relations to other laboratory inference tasks and to clinical judgment are discussed.     

Fromm’s understanding of the Buddhist philosophical theory and psychoanalysis: From the phenomenal ego to the authentic being1

Abstract

Erich Fromm was one of the first psychoanalytic thinkers who was genuinely interested in Asian philosophies. In the first part of this article, I will show Fromm’s imago of Buddhism as a radical, nontheistic, and ethical philosophy “without God.” I will argue that Fromm made an important difference between the phenomenal ego and being that proves crucial for his understanding of psychoanalysis and his critique of modern society. I will also explore Fromm’s synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and psychoanalysis, and show the similarities and differences between them.     

The Socialization of Children’s Memory: Linking Maternal Conversational Style to the Development of Children’s Autobiographical and Deliberate Memory Skills

Data from a large-scale, longitudinal research study with an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample were utilized to explore linkages between maternal elaborative conversational style and the development of children’s autobiographical and deliberate memory. Assessments were made when the children were aged 3, 5, and 6 years old, and the results reveal concurrent and longitudinal linkages between maternal conversational style in a mother–child reminiscing task and children’s autobiographical memory performance. Maternal conversational style while reminiscing was also significantly related to children’s strategic behaviors and recall in 2 deliberate memory tasks, both concurrently and longitudinally. Results from this examination replicate and extend what is known about the linkages between maternal conversational style, children’s abilities to talk about previous experiences, and children’s deliberate memory skills as they transition from the preschool years to early elementary school years.     

The road to understanding is paved with the speaker’s intentions: Cues to the speaker’s attention and intentions affect pronoun comprehension

A series of experiments explore the effects of attention-directing cues on pronoun resolution, contrasting four specific hypotheses about the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns he and she: (1) it is driven by grammatical rules, (2) it is primarily a function of social processing of the speaker’s intention to communicate, (3) it is modulated by the listener’s own egocentric attention, and (4) it is primarily a function of learned probabilistic cues. Experiment 1 demonstrates that pronoun interpretation is guided by the well-known N1 (first-mention) bias, which is also modulated by both the speaker’s gaze and pointing gestures. Experiment 2 demonstrates that a low-level visual capture cue has no effect on pronoun interpretation, in contrast with the social cue of pointing. Experiment 3 uses a novel intentional cue: the same attention-capture flash as in Experiment 2, but with instructions that the cue is intentionally created by the speaker. This cue does modulate the N1 bias, demonstrating the importance of information about the speaker’s intentions to pronoun resolution. Taken in sum, these findings demonstrate that pronoun resolution is a process best categorized as driven by an appreciation of the speaker’s communicative intent, which may be subserved by a sensitivity to predictive cues in the environment.     

From Adequacy to Apodicticity. Development of the Notion of Reflection in Husserl’s Phenomenology

The article explores a gradual refinement of the notion of reflection in Husserlian phenomenology. In his early period, Husserl takes phenomenological reflection to attain adequate evidence, since its object is self-given in an absolute and complete manner. However, this conception of reflection does not remain unchanged. Husserl later realizes that immanent perception or phenomenological reflection also involves a certain horizonality and naivety that has to do with its temporal nature and must be queried in a further critical, apodictic reflection. Focusing more on the notion of apodicticity than adequacy, Husserl subsequently ascribes a new methodological role to reflection: instead of a mere epistemic warrant that guarantees for us the ultimate truth of our experiential life once and for all, phenomenological reflection ensures the strictness of phenomenology insofar as it entails an ethical-existential dimension as the norm of a life-form where the subject pursues full self-understanding and self-justification.