你们要什么

耶稣问门徒：“你们要什么?”要清楚我们要什么,不妨先问问自己：我可以不要什么?我可以不要什么呢?细观你现在所拥有的,你会发现,从前你拼命想要得到的很多东西,今天是你所不需要的。当我们决定告诉上帝,我要什么时,不妨先清楚我可以不要什么;当我们决定向上帝要什么时,不妨先下定决心我要为此舍弃什么!     

Functional Properties are Epiphenomenal

Philosophia - I argue for the epiphenomenality of functional properties by means of thought experiments and general principles. General principles suggest that an object’s causal powers...     

On What We are and How We Persist

This article defends novel approaches to what we are and how we persist. First it is claimed that we have disjunctive persistence conditions: we can persist by way of either biological continuity or psychological continuity. Then it is claimed that we are neither human beings nor persons essentially. Rather, we are essentially bio‐psycho‐continuers, a concept to be explained along the way. A variety of objections are considered and found wanting.     

What children are looking at during shared storybook reading

Two studies were conducted to determine the extent to which young children fixate on the print of storybooks during shared book reading. Children's books varying in the layout of the print and the richness of the illustrations were displayed on a computer monitor. Each child's mother or preschool teacher read the books while the child sat on the adult's lap wearing an EyeLink headband that recorded visual fixations. In both studies, children spent very little time examining the print regardless of the nature of the print and illustrations. Although fixations on the illustrations were highly correlated with the length of the accompanying text and could be altered by altering the content of the text, fixations to the text were uncorrelated with the length of the text. These results indicate that preschool children engage in minimal exploration of the print during shared book reading.     

Organisation: What levels of processing are levels of

The psychology of thought and memory has historically been concerned with a struggle between associationism and its opponents. Organisation theory—in part an offspring of Gestalt concepts—has been the most successful and vocal of these contenders. The levels-of-processing framework has been a part of the effort to overcome associationist predilections. Aspects of principles of organisation and of the recent history of organisation theory are presented, followed by an analysis of the levels-of-processing approach in terms of organisational concepts.     

What young children think you see when their eyes are closed

The common assumption that young children egocentrically believe you cannot see them when their own eyes are closed was investigated in two studies. It was found that 2.5-4-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds and adults, would indeed often give negative reply to the experimenter's question “Do I see you?” when their eyes were closed and covered with their hands. However, they would also correctly reply that the experimenter did see their arm and an object placed in front of them and did not see their eyes and back, indicating that they were making veridical, nonegocentric inferences about the experimenter's visual experience. In addition, their eyes being visible to the experimenter did not prove to be either a necessary or a sufficient condition for their judgment that the experimenter could see “them” (“you”). It was concluded that, in this context, adults take “you” to mean their whole body while young children take it to mean primarily their face region. Speculations were made as to how young children could have acquired this meaning, and about possible similarities and differences between the self conceptions of young children and adults.     

What to expect from your remote eye-tracker when participants are unrestrained

The marketing materials of remote eye-trackers suggest that data quality is invariant to the position and orientation of the participant as long as the eyes of the participant are within the eye-tracker’s headbox, the area where tracking is possible. As such, remote eye-trackers are marketed as allowing the reliable recording of gaze from participant groups that cannot be restrained, such as infants, schoolchildren and patients with muscular or brain disorders. Practical experience and previous research, however, tells us that eye-tracking data quality, e.g. the accuracy of the recorded gaze position and the amount of data loss, deteriorates (compared to well-trained participants in chinrests) when the participant is unrestrained and assumes a non-optimal pose in front of the eye-tracker. How then can researchers working with unrestrained participants choose an eye-tracker? Here we investigated the performance of five popular remote eye-trackers from EyeTribe, SMI, SR Research, and Tobii in a series of tasks where participants took on non-optimal poses. We report that the tested systems varied in the amount of data loss and systematic offsets observed during our tasks. The EyeLink and EyeTribe in particular had large problems. Furthermore, the Tobii eye-trackers reported data for two eyes when only one eye was visible to the eye-tracker. This study provides practical insight into how popular remote eye-trackers perform when recording from unrestrained participants. It furthermore provides a testing method for evaluating whether a tracker is suitable for studying a certain target population, and that manufacturers can use during the development of new eye-trackers.     

Reduction,Autonomy, and Causal Exclusion Among Physical Properties

Synthese - Is there a problem of causal exclusion between micro- and macro-level physical properties? I argue (following Kim) that the sorts of properties thatin fact are in competition are macro...     

Broadcasting to an Enemy Country: What Appeals are Effective,and Why

Summary

This study examined inmate perceptions of the value of membership of penitentiary residential unit management committees for the rehabilitation of inmates. The degree of favorableness of inmate perceptions of the committees was treated as a function of their participation in a number of other penitentiary programs.

It was found that categorization of inmates in this way was useful for identifying and explaining differences in their perceptions of the utility of membership of the residential committees for rehabilitation. It was also found that in the case of three programs—group therapy, playing bridge, and individual counselling of inmates by classification officers —participants had significantly more favorable perceptions of residential committees than nonparticipants. A comparison of the perceptions of residential committees by these inmate samples and staff disclosed that only participation in counselling by classification officers and playing bridge resulted in inmates' perception of the committees becoming as favorable as those of the staff.

The conceptual framework of the study employed dissonance theory to account for the effect of participation on inmates' perceptions of the committees.     

Being confident without seeing: What subjective measures of visual consciousness are about

Can observers be confident about the accuracy of a discrimination response without a visual experience of the stimulus? In a series of five experiments, observers performed a masked orientation discrimination task, a masked shape discrimination task, or a random-dot motion discrimination task, followed by two subjective ratings after each trial, in which participants reported either their visual experience of the stimulus or their confidence in being correct. We observed that the threshold for ratings of the perception of the stimulus was above the threshold for ratings of a decision, that decision ratings outperformed stimulus ratings in predicting trial accuracy, and that different decision-related scales were more strongly associated with other decision-related scales than with ratings of stimulus clarity. We propose a taxonomy of subjective measures of consciousness that differentiates between subjective measures relating to the percept of the stimulus and measures relating to a discrimination decision and discuss the relation to type II blindsight.     

What friends are for! The use of routine standards in social comparison

Social comparisons are frequently used for self-evaluation. As a consequence, judges have to be efficient in each comparison step. Standard selection, however, is traditionally seen as an elaborate process in which judges deliberately select similar standards. We propose that often judges do not engage in such deliberate selection processes. Instead, they use routine standards--standards that have frequently been used for self-evaluation. Consistent with this assumption, Studies 1-3 demonstrate that student participants activate knowledge about their best friend--a likely routine standard--during self-evaluation. In Study 1, lexical decisions for the best friend's name are facilitated after self-evaluation. In Study 2, participants judge their best friend faster after evaluating themselves on the same dimension. In Study 3, this is even the case if the best friend is dissimilar and consequently undiagnostic. Finally, in Study 4, self-evaluations are primarily influenced by comparison information about an experimentally created routine standard.     

What You are Feeling and Why: Two Distinct Types of Emotional Clarity

Individual difference approaches have typically treated emotional clarity (i.e., one’s understanding of one’s own emotions) as a unitary construct. Based on strong theoretical reasons, in this study we explored two related aspects of emotional clarity in a student sample. The first, type awareness, refers to the extent to which people typically can identify and distinguish the types of emotions they experience. The second, source awareness, refers to the extent to which people typically know the causes of their emotions. We psychometrically distinguished self-report items of source and type awareness. Items measuring type awareness were obtained from traditional measures of the construct, clarity of emotions. As no existing measures assess individual differences in source awareness, we developed a set of items with strong face validity. Our results provide initial evidence that one can measure source and type awareness separately.     

Eliciting cues to deception and truth: What matters are the questions asked

In this paper we argue that there is little need for more of the traditional deception detection research in which observers assess short video clips in which there are few (if any) cues to deception and truth. We argue that a change in direction is needed and that researchers should focus on the questions the interviewer needs to ask in order to elicit and enhance cues to deception. We discuss three strands of research into this new ‘interviewing to detect deception’ approach. We encourage practitioners to use the proposed techniques and encourage other researchers to join us in conducting more research in this area. We offer some guidelines for what researchers need to keep in mind when carrying out research in this new paradigm.