Conditioned taste aversion and traditional learning

Summary The generality of the laws of learning has been questioned on the basis of the results of conditioned taste aversion (CTA) experiments. The results of CTA experiments and of traditional learning (TL) experiments are compared in order to evaluate whether CTA and TL indeed follow different rules. It is shown that (a) most of the observed differences between CTA and TL experiments may simply reflect peculiarities of the CSs and USs used in CTA, (b) that there are conflicting phenomena in both CTA and TL experiments which require further analysis, and (c) that the majority of learning phenomena seen in CTA experiments also occur in TL experiments. It is therefore suggested that the laws that hold for TL also apply to CTA.     

Literature and Thought Experiments

Like works of literature, thought experiments present fictional narratives that prompt reflection in their readers. Because of these and other similarities, a number of philosophers have argued for a strong analogy between works of literary fiction and thought experiments, some going so far as to say that works of literary fiction are a species of thought experiment. These arguments are often used in defending a cognitivist position with regard to literature: thought experiments produce knowledge, so works of literary fiction can too. This article concedes that works of literary fiction can be put to use in thought experiments, but not in a way that is helpful to the cognitivist. In particular, it draws three disanalogies in the ways we engage critically with thought experiments and with literary fictions. First, we use thought experiments to make arguments; second, we read thought experiments in strongly allegorical terms; and third, the terms of criticism we apply to thought experiments and to works of literature differ. Although these disanalogies present problems for the cognitivist position, they also give us a sharper picture of the distinctive educative potential of works of literary fiction.     

Blocking and pseudoblocking: new control experiments with honeybees

Prompted by doubts about the adequacy of the various control procedures long used in research on blocking, we repeated some earlier experiments with honeybees that had given the appearance of forward, concurrent, and backward blocking. The new experiments differed from the earlier experiments only in that the target stimulus was omitted during the training and was encountered for the first time in the test. In the new experiments, just as in the earlier experiments, the blocking groups responded less to the target stimulus than did the control groups. The results show that the effects of the different treatments of nontarget stimuli commonly compared in blocking experiments may generalize to the target stimulus and thus affect responding to that stimulus independently of experience with it. Implications for research on blocking in honeybees and other animals are considered.     

PsychMate: Providing psychology majors the tools to do real experiments and learn empirical methods

PsychMate is a set of software tools for undergraduate psychology students to run, develop, and analyze computerized experiments. It includes 30 psychological experiments in the areas of perception, cognition, social psychology, human factors, and cognitive neuroscience. Students run experiments themselves and see basic results immediately. The automatic spreadsheet analysis forms allow them to aggregate data and create analyses, presentations, and Web pages with a single click. Students can use the Psychology Experiment Authoring Kit experiment editor to create their own experiments in minutes and run experiments with other students using Web-based experiment-management tools. The Brain-Tutor and BrainViewer applications teach brain anatomy and permit students to analyze fMRI brain imaging data from subjects who have performed the same memory experiments in which they participated. PsychMate has been used in 83 classes in which 1,533 students submitted 5,464 completed experiments with few (less than 1%) requests for help and a very positive rating of the research experience.     

Blocking and pseudoblocking: New control experiments with honeybees

Prompted by doubts about the adequacy of the various control procedures long used in research on blocking, we repeated some earlier experiments with honeybees that had given the appearance of forward, concurrent, and backward blocking. The new experiments differed from the earlier experiments only in that the target stimulus was omitted during the training and was encountered for the first time in the test. In the new experiments, just as in the earlier experiments, the blocking groups responded less to the target stimulus than did the control groups. The results show that the effects of the different treatments of nontarget stimuli commonly compared in blocking experiments may generalize to the target stimulus and thus affect responding to that stimulus independently of experience with it. Implications for research on blocking in honeybees and other animals are considered.     

Functional Thought Experiments

The literature on thought experiments has been mainly concernedwith thought experiments that are directed at a theory, be it in aconstructive or a destructive manner. This has led somephilosophers to argue that all thought experiments can beformulated as arguments. The aim of this paper is to drawattention to a type of thought experiment that is not directed ata theory, but fulfills a specific function within a theory. Suchthought experiments are referred to as functional thoughtexperiments, and they are routinely used in applied statistics. An example is given from frequentist statistics, where a thoughtexperiment is required to establish the probability space. It isconcluded that (a) not all thought experiments can be formulated asarguments, and (b) the role of thought experiments is more generaland more important to scientific reasoning than has previouslybeen recognized.     

A slugfest of intuitions: contextualism and experimental design

This paper considers ways that experimental design can affect judgments about informally presented context shifting experiments. Reasons are given to think that judgments about informal context shifting experiments are affected by an exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments and by experimenter bias. Exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments may produce experimental artifacts by obscuring important differences of degree between the phenomena being investigated. Experimenter bias is an effect generated when, for example, experimenters disclose (even unconsciously) their own beliefs about the outcome of an experiment. Eliminating experimenter bias from context shifting experiments makes it far less obvious what the “intuitive” responses to those experiments are. After it is shown how those different kinds of bias can affect judgments about informal context shifting experiments, those experiments are revised to control for those forms of bias. The upshot of these investigations is that participants in the contextualist debate who employ informal experiments should pay just as much attention to the design of their experiments as those who employ more formal experimental techniques if they want to avoid obscuring the phenomena they aim to uncover.     

Recent reinforcement-schedule research and applied behavior analysis

Reinforcement schedules are considered in relation to applied behavior analysis by examining several recent laboratory experiments with humans and other animals. The experiments are drawn from three areas of contemporary schedule research: behavioral history effects on schedule performance, the role of instructions in schedule performance of humans, and dynamic schedules of reinforcement. All of the experiments are discussed in relation to the role of behavioral history in current schedule performance. The paper concludes by extracting from the experiments some more general issues concerning reinforcement schedules in applied research and practice.     

The logic of thought experiments

In this paper I argue that (at least many) philosophical thought experiments are unreliable. But I argue that this notion of unreliability has to be understood relative to the goal of thought experiments as knowledge producing. And relative to that goal many thought experiments in science are just as unreliable. But in fact thought experiments in science play a varied role and I will suggest that knowledge production is a goal only under quite limited circumstances. I defend the view that these circumstances can (sometimes) arise in philosophy as well.     

Thought Experiments in Philosophy: A Neo-Kantian and Experimentalist Point of View

The paper addresses the question of the nature and limits of philosophical thought experiments. On the one hand, experimental philosophers are right to claim that we need much more laboratory work in order to have more reliable thought experiments, but on the other hand a naturalism that is too radical is incapable of clarifying the peculiarity of thought experiments in philosophy. Starting from a historico-critical reconstruction of Kant’s concept of the “experiments of pure reason”, this paper outlines an account of thought experiments in philosophy that tries to reconcile the thesis of a principled difference between scientific and philosophical TEs with the position of a methodological naturalism that does not admit any difference in kind between the methods of science and of philosophy.

     

An on-line laboratory in cognition and perception

The design of a computer-based laboratory system requires the coordination of pedagogical and technical goals. The development of our on-line laboratory in cognition and perception is described. The laboratory consists of 11 on-line experiments in which the student participates as both experimenter and subject. The software was designed for maximum transportability: Programs were written in a low-level BASIC, with thorough documentation; flexibility is provided both within and across experiments to suit local constraints; and the experiments are supported by a student manual, instructor’s manual, and implementation notes. Criteria for selecting experiments, implementation of the experiments, and preliminary evaluation of the laboratory are discussed.     

An evaluation of methods for behavioral investigations of teleost audition

Auditory thresholds have been determined for the goldfish by six groups of workers and the data in the experiments varied by as much as 20–30 dB. In order to isolate the basis for this variability, auditory thresholds were determined using conditioned suppression of respiration and method of limits. These thresholds were very similar to those obtained with avoidance conditioning and a tracking method for threshold determination. Acoustic procedures were kept constant in the two series of experiments, and it appears that wide variation in auditory thresholds for goldfish shown in different experiments is due to acoustic conditions in the experiments.     

Differential susceptibility experiments: going beyond correlational evidence: comment on beyond mental health, differential susceptibility articles

Reviewing the studies on differential susceptibility presented in this section, we argue that the time is ripe to go beyond correlational designs to differential susceptibility experiments. In such experiments, randomization prevents hidden moderator effects on the environment and guarantees the independence of moderator and outcome, while the environment is manipulated and assessed in standard ways. Correlational studies generate a priori expectations about crucial moderators (e.g., temperament, biological sensitivity, and genetics). We discuss the differential susceptibility experiments available up until now and conclude that these experiments are feasible and contribute in unique ways to our conceptions of differential susceptibility.     

QUANTUM PHYSICS AND THEOLOGY: JOHN POLKINGHORNE ON THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

Abstract Thought experimentation is part of accepted scientific practice, and this makes it surprising that philosophers of science did not seriously engage with it for a very long time. The situation changed in the 1990s, resulting in a highly intriguing debate over thought experiments. Initially, the discussion focused mostly on thought experiments in physics, philosophy, and mathematics. Other disciplines have since become the subject of interest. Yet, nothing substantial has been said about the role of thought experiments in nonphilosophical theology. This paper discusses the role of thought experiments in Christian theology in comparison to their role in quantum physics, as mentioned by John Polkinghorne in Quantum Physics and Theology. We first look briefly at the history of the inquiry into thought experiments and then at Polkinghorne's remarks about the role of thought experimentation in quantum physics and Christian eschatology. To determine the actual importance of thought experiments in Christian theology a number of new examples are introduced in a third step. In the light of these examples, in a fourth step, we address the question of what it is that explains the cognitive efficacy of thought experiments in quantum physics and Christian theology.     

ARTIST: A computer system for creating and running psychology experiments

A flexible computer system for research and teaching experiments in psychology is described. Special features of the system include (1) separate phases for the generation and running of experiments, (2) facilities to control presentation of stimuli according to any factorial design, and (3) different modes of operation depending on the prior knowledge of the users. The system is evaluated both in terms of the range of experiments that can be performed and in terms of the time and effort required to create new experiments or modify old ones. General principles for designing interactive systems are discussed in the light of experiences with this particular system.     

A tale of two methods

Simulations (both digital and analog) and experiments share many features. But what essential features distinguish them? I discuss two proposals in the literature. On one proposal, experiments investigate nature directly, while simulations merely investigate models. On another proposal, simulations differ from experiments in that simulationists manipulate objects that bear only a formal (rather than material) similarity to the targets of their investigations. Both of these proposals are rejected. I argue that simulations fundamentally differ from experiments with regard to the background knowledge that is invoked to argue for the “external validity” of the investigation.     

PET studies of language: An assessment of the reliability of the technique

In order to understand the basis of language in the brain, we must be able to describe the neurological systems that are used in language comprehension and production. In this paper, one technique for functional neuroimaging is discussed: measurement of blood flow change using positron emission tomography (PET). Two experiments were carried out investigating the usefulness of this method. One experiment examined the intrinsic time limitations of blood flow change as a measure of cognitive activity. A second issue considered is the replicability of the results obtained using this method. A comparison of two experiments containing the same conditions suggests that the results are replicable, when the experiments and method are similar. One case is discussed where the experiments differ; it is suggested that this is due to a difference in the materials used in the experiments, and that the difference has a principled basis.     

Cerebral lateralization of function and bilingual decision processes: Is thinking lateralized?

Four experiments utilizing tachistoscopic presentation of verbal and spatial stimuli to visual half-fields are presented. Three experiments failed to find any cerebral lateralization effect of the type predicted from existing models of cerebral lateralization processes. One experiment found marked lateralization effects. Since the experiments differ only in the ratio of trials to experimental stimuli, it is argued that cerebral lateralization experiments are detecting only a memory process occurring after subjects have learned all the stimuli to be presented. When new stimuli are presented on each trial, no cerebral lateralization effects are found, suggesting that active ongoing cognitive processing is independent of lateralization.     

Influence of a beacon on spatial learning based on the shape of the test environment.

In 5 experiments rats were required to escape from a triangular shaped pool by swimming to a submerged platform. The principal group of interest in each experiment received training with a beacon attached to the platform. The purpose of the experiments was to assess if the beacon overshadowed (Experiments 1-4) or blocked (Experiment 5) learning about the position of the platform with reference to the shape of the pool. The platform was located in the center of the pool for the first 2 experiments and in a corner for the remaining experiments. Although there was an overshadowing effect in Experiment 1, the remaining experiments failed to reveal any disruptive influence of the beacon on learning based on the shape of the pool. Moreover, in Experiments 3-5 there was an indication that the beacon facilitated such learning. The results suggest that spatial learning based on the shape of a test environment may not take place in the same way as that based on more discrete landmarks.