To see or not to see: infants prefer to follow the gaze of a reliable looker

In two experiments, we examined whether 14‐month‐olds understand the subjective nature of gaze. In the first experiment, infants first observed an experimenter express happiness as she looked inside a container that either contained a toy (reliable looker condition) or was empty (unreliable looker condition). Then, infants had to follow the same experimenter's gaze to a target object located either behind or in front of a barrier. Infants in the reliable looker condition followed the experimenter's gaze behind the barrier more often than infants in the unreliable looker condition, whereas both groups followed the experimenter's gaze to the target object located in front of the barrier equally often. In the second experiment, infants did not generalize their knowledge about the unreliability of a looker to a second ‘naïve’ looker. These findings suggest that 14‐month‐old infants adapt their gaze following as a function of their past experience with the looker.     

Naïve Groups Can Solve the Hidden‐Profile Problem

Research involving hidden‐profile tasks suggests that groups typically fail to detect hidden profiles. In previous studies, group members always considered the alternatives in the choice tasks prior to joining the group and, thus, entered discussions with preformed preferences (predecided groups). We set up a new condition, in which group members received their information regarding the choice alternatives at the beginning of their group session (naïve groups). When information was provided in the form of common rather than in the form of unique cues, naïve groups detected the hidden profile throughout. The results indicate that naïve groups are able to detect hidden profiles.     

High Versus Low Aggressive Priming During Video‐Game Training: Effects on Violent Action During Game Play,Hostility, Heart Rate,and Blood Pressure1

Playing violent video games is related to increased negative affect and cardiovascular reactivity. We examined the influence of high and low aggressive priming during video‐game training on violence during game play (e.g., shooting, choking), hostility, frustration with game play, blood pressure, and heart rate. Male undergraduates (N= 36) were assigned to a high aggressive or low aggressive video‐game priming condition. After training, they played Metal Gear Solid^(tm), which allows players to advance by using stealth, violence, or both. Participants in the high aggressive priming condition used significantly more violent action during game play and reported more hostility than those in the low aggressive priming condition. Heart rate was correlated with feelings of hostility. These findings indicate that both aggressive priming and use of game violence influence arousal and negative affect and might increase behavioral aggression.     

Exploring children’s movement characteristics during virtual reality video game play

There is increasing interest in the use of commercially-available virtual reality video gaming systems within pediatric rehabilitation, yet little is known about the movement characteristics of game play. This study describes quantity and quality of movement during Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit game play, explores differences in these movement characteristics between games and between novice and experienced players, and investigates whether motivation to succeed at the game impacts movement characteristics. Thirty-eight children (aged 7–12) with and without previous game experience played Wii (boxing and tennis) and Wii Fit (ski slalom and soccer heading) games. Force plate data provided center of pressure displacement (quantity) and processed pelvis motion indicated smoothness of pelvic movement (quality). Children rated their motivation to succeed at each game. Movement quantity and quality differed between games (p < .001). Children with previous experience playing Wii Fit games demonstrated greater movement quantity during Wii Fit game play (p < .001); quality of movement did not differ between groups. Motivation to succeed did not influence the relationship between experience and outcomes. Findings enhance clinical understanding of this technology and inform the development of research questions to explore its potential to improve movement skills in children with motor impairments.     

Connection‐based and object‐based grouping in multiple‐object tracking: A developmental study

Developmental research on Gestalt laws has previously revealed that, even as young as infancy, we are bound to group visual elements into unitary structures in accordance with a variety of organizational principles. Here, we focus on the developmental trajectory of both connection‐based and object‐based grouping, and investigate their impact on object formation in participants, aged 9–21 years old (N = 113), using a multiple‐object tracking paradigm. Results reveal a main effect of both age and grouping type, indicating that 9‐ to 21‐year‐olds are sensitive to both connection‐based and object‐based grouping interference, and tracking ability increases with age. In addition to its importance for typical development, these results provide an informative baseline to understand clinical aberrations in this regard.

Statement of contribution

What is already known on this subject?

• The origin of the Gestalt principles is still an ongoing debate: Are they innate, learned over time, or both?
• Developmental research has revealed how each Gestalt principle has its own trajectory and unique relationship to visual experience.
• Both connectedness and object‐based grouping play an important role in object formation during childhood.

What does this study add?

• The study identifies how sensitivity to connectedness and object‐based grouping evolves in individuals, aged 9–21 years old.
• Using multiple‐object tracking, results reveal that the ability to track multiple objects increases with age.
• These results provide an informative baseline to understand clinical aberrations in different types of grouping.

     

Transparency About Painkillers: A Remedy for the Evaluativist's Headache

The paradox of pain is that pain is in some ways like a bodily state and in other ways like a mental state. You can have a pain in your shin, but there is no denying that you are in pain if it feels like you are. How can a state be both in your shin and in your mind? Evaluativism is a promising answer. According to evaluativism, an experience of pain in your shin represents that there is a disturbance in your shin, and that it is bad that this disturbance is there. Thus, the experience brings you to tend to your shin by telling you something about the state of your shin. But the paradox of pain still confronts evaluativism in the form of the killing the messenger objection: The evaluativist has a nice story about our body‐directed responses to pain, like tending to wounds, but this story does not explain responses to pain, like taking painkillers, that seem to be experience‐directed. Evaluativists have offered accounts of experience‐directed responses to pain, but I will argue that these accounts conflict with the Transparency thesis—the claim that we can only access our experiences inferentially. Evaluativism and Transparency are natural bedfellows, so this is a problem for evaluativists. Having argued as much, I will go on to develop a new evaluativist account of taking painkillers, which does not conflict with Transparency. I call it naïve evaluativism. According to naïve evaluativism, we experience painkillers as making tissue damage or disruption less bad, and absent further reflection, that is, why we take them.     

Naïve Realism,Hallucination, and Causation: A New Response to the Screening Off Problem

This paper sets out a novel response to the ‘screening off’ problem for naïve realism. The aim is to resist the claim (which many naïve realists accept) that the kind of experience involved in hallucinating also occurs during perception, by arguing that there are causal constraints that must be met if an hallucinatory experience is to occur, ones that are never met in perceptual cases. Notably, given this response, it turns out that, contra current orthodoxy, naïve realists need not adopt any particular view about the psychological nature of hallucinatory experience to handle the screening off problem. Consequently, room opens up for naïve realists to endorse whatever theory of hallucinatory experience seems to best capture the distinctive nature of such episodes.     

Mapping differential responses to cognitive training using machine learning

We used two simple unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify differential trajectories of change in children who undergo intensive working memory (WM) training. We used self‐organizing maps (SOMs)—a type of simple artificial neural network—to represent multivariate cognitive training data, and then tested whether the way tasks are represented changed as a result of training. The patterns of change we observed in the SOM weight matrices implied that the processes drawn upon to perform WM tasks changed following training. This was then combined with K‐means clustering to identify distinct groups of children who respond to the training in different ways. Firstly, the K‐means clustering was applied to an independent large sample (N = 616, M_age = 9.16 years, range = 5.16–17.91 years) to identify subgroups. We then allocated children who had been through cognitive training (N = 179, M_age = 9.00 years, range = 7.08–11.50 years) to these same four subgroups, both before and after their training. In doing so, we were able to map their improvement trajectories. Scores on a separate measure of fluid intelligence were predictive of a child's improvement trajectory. This paper provides an alternative approach to analysing cognitive training data that go beyond considering changes in individual tasks. This proof‐of‐principle demonstrates a potentially powerful way of distinguishing task‐specific from domain‐general changes following training and of establishing different profiles of response to training.     

Naïve realism: a simple approach

Naïve realism is often characterized, by its proponents and detractors alike, as the view that for a subject to undergo a perceptual experience is for her to stand in a simple two-place acquaintance relation toward an object. However, two of the leading defenders of naïve realism, John Campbell and Bill Brewer, have thought it necessary to complicate this picture, claiming that a third relatum is needed to account for various possible differences between distinct visual experiences of the same object (for example, differences that result from changes in the object’s spatial orientation relative to the subject, or from changes in the intensity with which the subject focuses her attention on the object). This, I argue, is a mistake. Once it is acknowledged that a subject’s visual experience acquaints her with more than just a single object, all of the relevant facts can be explained from within the simpler naïve realist framework.

     

The phenomenological directness of perceptual experience

When you have a perceptual experience of a given physical object that object seems to be immediately present to you in a way it never does when you consciously think about or imagine it. Many philosophers have claimed that naïve realism (the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of acquaintance to the world) can provide a satisfying account of this phenomenological directness of perceptual experience while the content view (the view that to perceive is to represent the world to be a certain way) cannot. I argue that this claim is false. Specifically, I maintain that the only acceptable naïve realist account of the relevant phenomenology is circular and that the content view can provide a similar account. In addition, I maintain that a certain specific variety of the content view provides a non-circular and thus more satisfactory account of this phenomenology. If so, then contrary to what is commonly assumed there are powerful phenomenological grounds for preferring the content view to naïve realism.     

Introspection and Primacy of Perception: A Critical Reflection on Naïve Realism

A fundamental issue in philosophy of perception is to understand the nature of experience and the relation of the experience with objects or states of affairs that is experienced. A prominent philosophical issue here is posed by the possibility of hallucinatory experiences, which are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perception for the experiencer. The philosophical views in this matter can be grouped into three major positions on the basis of the nature of the subjective experience and relation of the subjective experience with the object. These are the sense-data theories—which consider that the objects of perception are mental entities; the representative theories—according to which perception is a representation of the objects in the external world; and the naïve realist theories—which proclaim that the external objects are constitutive of the very perceptual experience and not a representation of it. Naïve realism claims it is the defence of common-sense notion regarding experience i.e. how experience seems to the experiencer upon introspective reflection on it. This position has a growing number of proponents in philosophy especially in the last two decades. But it also entails radical departure of established philosophical views regarding the nature of experience, the phenomenal character of experience, and the experiencer–object relation. In this paper, we critically examine naïve realism from two crucial aspects pertaining to it—the question of introspection being basis of naïve realist thesis, and the notion of primacy of perception over non-veridical forms of experiences. We find that there are significant problems which weaken the naïve realist thesis.

     

Supporting Generative Thinking About the Integer Number Line in Elementary Mathematics

This report provides evidence of the influence of a tutorial “communication game” on fifth graders’ generative understanding of the integer number line. Students matched for classroom and pretest score were randomly assigned to a tutorial (n = 19) and control group (n = 19). The tutorial group students played a 13-problem game in which student and tutor each were required to mark the same position on a number line but could not see one another's activities. To resolve discrepant solutions, tutor and student constructed agreements about number line principles and conventions to guide subsequent placements. Pre-/posttest contrasts showed that (a) tutorial students gained more than controls and (b) agreement use predicted gain. Analyses of micro-constructions during play revealed properties of student learning trajectories.     

Color Illusion

As standardly conceived, an illusion is an experience of an object o appearing F where o is not in fact F. Paradigm examples of color illusion, however, do not fit this pattern. A diagnosis of this uncovers different sense of appearance talk that is the basis of a dilemma for the standard conception. The dilemma is only a challenge. But if the challenge cannot be met, then any conception of experience, such as representationalism, that is committed to the standard conception is false. Perhaps surprisingly, naïve realism provides a better account of color illusion.

相似文献   

The Value of Perception

This paper develops a form of transcendental naïve realism. According to naïve realism, veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational. According to transcendental naïve realism, the naïve realist theory of perception is not just one theory of perception amongst others, to be established as an inference to the best explanation and assessed on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis that weighs performance along a number of different dimensions: for instance, fidelity to appearances, simplicity, systematicity, fit with scientific theories, and so on. Rather, naïve realism enjoys a special status in debates in the philosophy of perception because it represents part of the transcendental project of explaining how it is possible that perceptual experience has the distinctive characteristics it does. One of the potentially most interesting prospects of adopting a transcendental attitude towards naïve realism is that it promises to make the naïve realist theory of perception, in some sense, immune to falsification. This paper develops a modest form of transcendental naïve realism modelled loosely on the account of the reactive attitudes provided by Strawson in ‘Freedom and Resentment’, and suggests one way of understanding the claim that naïve realism is immune to falsification.     

Voltaire's Candide, medical students, and mentoring

In Voltaire's work, Candide, a young, naïve man, who has been taught that humans live in the best of all possible worlds, is thrust into the world only to find that this may not be so. He learns over time to balance his optimism with the skepticism he acquires through experience. While today's medical students are not naïve like the character Candide, they, nonetheless, carry an impression of the ideal medical practice, along with the expectation of a successful medical practice. Good mentors and role models are important to students in order to temper their optimism, control their skepticism, and to help them to be realistic, not only about their expectations of medical practice, but what society expects of them.     

The Effect of Violent Videogame Playtime on Anger

Studies have found evidence that, after playing violent videogames for 20 min, people experience a mean short‐term increase in aggression, hostility, and anger. The current research investigated whether or not players habituate during longer, more realistic lengths of play. Participants (N = 98) were randomly assigned to play the game Quake III Arena for either 20 or 60 min. Participants in the long condition showed a smaller change in state anger (CSA) from pre‐ to post‐gameplay than those in the short condition, although this did not reach significance. Change in scores for gamers (not novice players) showed that short gaming led to a larger increase in anger ratings than long gaming. When the results for violent videogame players were analysed separately, there was no significant increase in anger post‐gameplay—irrespective of length of time playing. Results also supported the hypotheses that females would show a significantly larger CSA than males and that participants previously unexposed to violent videogames would show a significantly larger CSA than exposed participants.     

First‐Person Shooters and the Third‐Person Effect

A sample of 118 U.S. 6th and 7th graders was used to examine early adolescents’ views of whether video games negatively influence themselves, others of the same age, and younger others. Six specific games ranging in rating from E for Everyone to M for Mature were listed for the early adolescents to respond to, with questions asked about both potential influence and whether young people should be allowed to play the games. Results support a third‐person perception that grew as the rating of the game became more restrictive and as the “other” group in question became younger. The presence of rules set by parents about video game use was a positive predictor of perceptions of influence on self and others.     

Racing dragons and remembering aliens: Benefits of playing number and working memory games on kindergartners' numerical knowledge

Sources that contribute to variation in mathematical achievement include both numerical knowledge and general underlying cognitive processing abilities. The current study tested the benefits of tablet‐based training games that targeted each of these areas for improving the mathematical knowledge of kindergarten‐age children. We hypothesized that playing a number‐based game targeting numerical magnitude knowledge would improve children's broader numerical skills. We also hypothesized that the benefits of playing a working memory (WM) game would transfer to children's numerical knowledge given its important underlying role in mathematics achievement. Kindergarteners from diverse backgrounds (n = 148; 52% girls; M_age = 71.87 months) were randomly assigned to either play a number‐based game, a WM game, or a control game on a tablet for 10 sessions. Structural equation modeling was used to model children's learning gains in mathematics and WM across time. Overall, our results suggest that playing the number game improved kindergarten children's numerical knowledge at the latent level, and these improvements remained stable as assessed 1 month later. However, children in the WM group did not improve their numerical knowledge compared to children in the control condition. Playing both the number game and WM game improved children's WM at the latent level. Importantly, the WM group continued to improve their WM for at least a month after playing the games. The results demonstrate that computerized games that target both domain‐specific and domain‐general skills can benefit a broad range of kindergarten‐aged children.     

Effects of realism on extended violent and nonviolent video game play on aggressive thoughts,feelings, and physiological arousal

Previous research has shown that playing violent video game exposure can increase aggressive thoughts, aggressive feelings, and physiological arousal. This study compared the effects that playing a realistic violent, unrealistic violent, or nonviolent video game for 45 min has on such variables. For the purpose of this study, realism was defined as the probability of seeing an event in real life. Participants (N=74; 39 male, 35 female) played either a realistic violent, unrealistic violent, or nonviolent video game for 45 min. Aggressive thoughts and aggressive feelings were measured four times (every 15 min), whereas arousal was measured continuously. The results showed that, though playing any violent game stimulated aggressive thoughts, playing a more realistic violent game stimulated significantly more aggressive feelings and arousal over the course of play. Aggr. Behav. 35:213–224, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Source‐Goal Asymmetries in Motion Representation: Implications for Language Production and Comprehension

Recent research has demonstrated an asymmetry between the origins and endpoints of motion events, with preferential attention given to endpoints rather than beginnings of motion in both language and memory. Two experiments explore this asymmetry further and test its implications for language production and comprehension. Experiment 1 shows that both adults and 4‐year‐old children detect fewer within‐category changes in source than goal objects when tested for memory of motion events; furthermore, these groups produce fewer references to source than goal objects when describing the same motion events. Experiment 2 asks whether the specificity of encoding source/goal relations differs in both spatial memory and the comprehension of novel spatial vocabulary. Results show that endpoint configuration changes are detected more accurately than source configuration changes by both adults and young children. Furthermore, when interpreting novel motion verbs, both age groups expect more fine‐grained lexical distinctions in the domain of endpoint configurations compared to that of source configurations. These studies demonstrate that a cognitive‐attentional bias in spatial representation and memory affects both the detail of linguistic encoding during the use of spatial language and the specificity of hypotheses about spatial referents that learners build during the acquisition of the spatial lexicon.