2D location biases depth-from-disparity judgments but not vice versa

Visual cognition in our 3D world requires understanding how we accurately localize objects in 2D and depth, and what influence both types of location information have on visual processing. Spatial location is known to play a special role in visual processing, but most of these findings have focused on the special role of 2D location. One such phenomena is the spatial congruency bias, where 2D location biases judgments of object features but features do not bias location judgments. This paradigm has recently been used to compare different types of location information in terms of how much they bias different types of features. Here we used this paradigm to ask a related question: whether 2D and depth-from-disparity location bias localization judgments for each other. We found that presenting two objects in the same 2D location biased position-in-depth judgments, but presenting two objects at the same depth (disparity) did not bias 2D location judgments. We conclude that an object’s 2D location may be automatically incorporated into perception of its depth location, but not vice versa, which is consistent with a fundamentally special role for 2D location in visual processing.     

Object-based representations govern both the storage of information in visual short-term memory and the retrieval of information from it

Interest is growing in how information is retained in visual short-term memory (VSTM). We describe an experiment that assesses VSTM within the context of multidimensional signal detection theory. On every trial, participants were presented with a 250-ms display containing four colored shapes. They were then probed 900 ms later with a colored shape and made separate old/new judgments about the color and the shape. In any particular trial, one, both, or neither of the probed features had been presented. Performance differed according to whether both probed features belonged to a single object or to two different objects. When both probed features belonged to the same object, featural retrieval was better than would be predicted by independent feature storage. When both probed features belonged to two different objects, featural retrieval was worse than would be predicted by independent feature storage. We conclude that storage in and retrieval from VSTM operate on the basis of object-based representations.     

Perception as interacting psychophysical functions. Could the configuring of features replace a specialised receptor?

This paper illustrates how perception is achieved through interactions among the psychophysical functions of judged features of an object. The theory is that the perceiver places processed features in a multidimensional space of discriminal processes. Each dimension is scaled in units of discrimination performance. The zero coordinate of each feature is its level in an internal standard (norm) established by previous experience of that category of object in context. Experiments are reported which show that one, two, or three concurrent single-featured objects matched the multiple features of another object in two ways. Either stimulation from the two objects had discrimination distances from norm that added, or the stimulation by one object was processed through a concept describing stimulation by the other object. It follows that, in this case, perception via a receptor for the multi-featured object can be replaced by a point of balance among receptors for each single feature. The object with its own receptor is the gustatory stimulant L-glutamic acid as its monosodium salt. The features that stimulate diverse gustatory receptors of their own are sodium chloride, citric acid, sucrose, and caffeine. A more complex approach to dimensional coding was developed earlier for photoreceptors in colour judgments. The present approach is modality independent, mathematically simple, and economical in experimental data.     

Proposition, definition and inference in ancient Chinese philosophy

This article attempts to explore ancient Chinese philosophical thought by analyzing how pioneering Chinese thinkers made judgments and inferences, and compares it to ancient Greek philosophy. It first addresses the starting-point and the object of cognition in Chinese ancient philosophy, then analyses how early thinkers construed definition and proposition, and finally discusses how they made inferences on the basis of definition and proposition. It points out that categorization is an important methodology in ancient Chinese philosophy, and that rectification of names and the doctrine of the mean are key criteria in making judgments.     

MENTAL IMAGERY AND THE VARIETIES OF AMODAL PERCEPTION

The problem of amodal perception is the problem of how we represent features of perceived objects that are occluded or otherwise hidden from us. Bence Nanay (2010 ) has recently proposed that we amodally perceive an object's occluded features by imaginatively projecting them into the relevant regions of visual egocentric space. In this paper, I argue that amodal perception is not a single, unitary capacity. Drawing appropriate distinctions reveals amodal perception to be characterized not only by mental imagery, as Nanay suggests, but also by genuinely visual representations as well as beliefs. I conclude with some brief remarks on the role of object‐directed bodily action in conferring a sense of unseen presence on an object's occluded features.     

The Subjective Basis of Kant's Judgment of Taste

Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful.     

Binding object features to locations: Does the “spatial congruency bias” update with object movement?

One of the fundamental challenges of visual cognition is how our visual systems combine information about an object’s features with its spatial location. A recent phenomenon related to object–location binding, the “spatial congruency bias,” revealed that two objects are more likely to be perceived as having the same identity or features if they appear in the same spatial location, versus if the second object appears in a different location. The spatial congruency bias suggests that irrelevant location information is automatically encoded with and bound to other object properties, biasing perceptual judgments. Here we further explored this new phenomenon and its role in object–location binding by asking what happens when an object moves to a new location: Is the spatial congruency bias sensitive to spatiotemporal contiguity cues, or does it remain linked to the original object location? Across four experiments, we found that the spatial congruency bias remained strongly linked to the original object location. However, under certain circumstances—for instance, when the first object paused and remained visible for a brief time after the movement—the congruency bias was found at both the original location and the updated location. These data suggest that the spatial congruency bias is based more on low-level visual information than on spatiotemporal contiguity cues, and reflects a type of object–location binding that is primarily tied to the original object location and that may only update to the object’s new location if there is time for the features to be re-encoded and rebound following the movement.     

Surface features of utterances, credibility judgments, and memory

Information acquired in conversation is often not credible, which makes monitoring its credibility critical. Listeners of conversations often use surface features of utterances, such as pause and intonation, to guide their credibility judgments. In this research, we explore whether listeners' delayed credibility judgments about remembered information are affected by the surface features of the speakers' utterances. In addition, we examine some of the specific factors involved in this issue: (1) how listeners' listening strategies influence their subsequent credibility judgments and (2) how the type of surface features of the utterances influences listeners' ability to make delayed credibility judgments. The results indicate that intonation of the utterances continues to influence listeners' assessment of the credibility of remembered information, that the influences of intonation depend on listening strategies, and that people have difficulty using/remembering pause length when making a delayed credibility judgment. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

The experience of force: the role of haptic experience of forces in visual perception of object motion and interactions, mental simulation, and motion-related judgments

Forces are experienced in actions on objects. The mechanoreceptor system is stimulated by proximal forces in interactions with objects, and experiences of force occur in a context of information yielded by other sensory modalities, principally vision. These experiences are registered and stored as episodic traces in the brain. These stored representations are involved in generating visual impressions of forces and causality in object motion and interactions. Kinematic information provided by vision is matched to kinematic features of stored representations, and the information about forces and causality in those representations then forms part of the perceptual interpretation. I apply this account to the perception of interactions between objects and to motions of objects that do not have perceived external causes, in which motion tends to be perceptually interpreted as biological or internally caused. I also apply it to internal simulations of events involving mental imagery, such as mental rotation, trajectory extrapolation and judgment, visual memory for the location of moving objects, and the learning of perceptual judgments and motor skills. Simulations support more accurate judgments when they represent the underlying dynamics of the event simulated. Mechanoreception gives us whatever limited ability we have to perceive interactions and object motions in terms of forces and resistances; it supports our practical interventions on objects by enabling us to generate simulations that are guided by inferences about forces and resistances, and it helps us learn novel, visually based judgments about object behavior.     

RELIGIOUS ETHICS AND EMPIRICAL ETHICS

In recent decades, cognitive and behavioral scientists have learned a great deal about how people think and behave. On the most general level, there is a basic consensus that many judgments, including ethical judgments, are made by intuitive, even unconscious, impulses. This basic insight has opened the door to a wide variety of more particular studies that investigate how judgments are influenced by group identity, self‐conception, emotions, perceptions of risk, and many other factors. When these forms of research engage ethical issues, they are sometimes called empirical ethics. This essay argues that the field of religious ethics would benefit from a more robust engagement with empirical ethics than it has thus far undertaken. In doing so, it offers a brief account of how issues of moral psychology and moral anthropology have been treated in religious ethics, and it highlights ways that the scientific findings challenge some prevailing norms in religious ethics. It ends by suggesting avenues by which religious ethics research could productively engage empirical ethics.     

Emotion and Moral Judgment

This paper argues that an emotion is a state of affectively perceiving its intentional object as falling under a "thick affective concept" A, a concept that combines cognitive and affective aspects in a way that cannot be pulled apart. For example, in a state of pity an object is seen as pitiful , where to see something as pitiful is to be in a state that is both cognitive and affective. One way of expressing an emotion is to assert that the intentional object of the emotion falls under the thick affective concept distinctive of the emotion. I argue that the most basic kind of moral judgment is in this category. It has the form "That is A" (pitiful, contemptible, rude, etc.). Such judgments combine the features of cognitivism and motivational judgment internalism, an advantage that explains why we find moral weakness problematic in spite of its ubiquity. I then outline a process I call "thinning" the judgment, which explains how moral strength, weakness, and apathy arise. I argue that this process is necessary for moral reasoning and communication, in spite of its disadvantage in disengaging the agent's motivating emotion from the judgment.     

Basic-level kinds and object persistence

In three experiments, we explored the basis of adults’ judgments of individual object persistence through transformation. Participants watched scenarios in which an object underwent a transformation into an object belonging to the same or a different basic-level kind. Participants were queried about the object’s persistence through the transformation as an individual (indexed by its proper name) and as a member of the original kind (indexed by its basic-level count noun in Experiments 1 and 2, or by its superordinate-level noun in Experiment 3). In all experiments, participants rated objects that were altered in a way that maintained basic-level kind to be less likely to retain their proper name than those that were altered in a way that changed basic-level kind. These findings suggest that shared basic-level kind membership serves as a dimension of similarity over which objects’ unique individual identities are highlighted. We discuss the implications of the results for existing theoretical accounts of adults’ judgments of individual object persistence.     

Ownership and object history

Appropriate behavior in relation to an object often requires judging whether it is owned and, if so, by whom. The authors propose accounts of how people make these judgments. Our central claim is that both judgments often involve making inferences about object history. In judging whether objects are owned, people may assume that artifacts (e.g., chairs) are owned and that natural objects (e.g., pinecones) are not. However, people may override these assumptions by inferring the history of intentional acts made in relation to objects. In judging who owns an object, people may often consider which person likely possessed the object in the past--such reasoning may be responsible for people's bias to assume that the first person known to possess an object is its owner.     

The Boring

This article discusses the aesthetic concept of boringness, of which there has been relatively little philosophical discussion, especially along its objective, nonpsychological dimensions. I begin by confronting skepticism about the validity of judgments about boringness and rebut suggestions to the effect that these judgments are inevitably compromised by mistakes or vices of the audience. The article then develops an account focused on certain kinds of reasonable expectations we form in a given aesthetic context. I go on to confront the question of whether boringness is inevitable given the internal imperatives of works of art and illustrate the discussion with Richard Wagner's Ring cycle. Although I focus on art, I conclude by drawing some connections with the boring in everyday life.     

Nameless + harmless = blameless: When seemingly irrelevant factors influence judgment of (un)ethical behavior

People often make judgments about the ethicality of others’ behaviors and then decide how harshly to punish such behaviors. When they make these judgments and decisions, sometimes the victims of the unethical behavior are identifiable, and sometimes they are not. In addition, in our uncertain world, sometimes an unethical action causes harm, and sometimes it does not. We argue that a rational assessment of ethicality should not depend on the identifiability of the victim of wrongdoing or the actual harm caused if the judge and the decision maker have the same information. Yet in five laboratory studies, we show that these factors have a systematic effect on how people judge the ethicality of the perpetrator of an unethical action. Our studies show that people judge behavior as more unethical when: (1) identifiable vs. unidentifiable victims are involved and (2) the behavior leads to a negative rather than a positive outcome. We also find that people’s willingness to punish wrongdoers is consistent with their judgments, and we offer preliminary evidence on how to reduce these biases.     

Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguous Ethics of Political Violence

In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate ate what is presupposed by a resistant politics that adopts violence as its instrument, Beauvoir illuminates the problems encountered by the kinds of “realistic and positive” and “idealistic and moral” arguments through which the use of violence in politics is routinely justified. At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates that to deconstruct the question of the legitimacy of violence is neither to banish nor resolve it. She does not offer a recipe for determining the legitimacy or otherwise of the use of violence in politics in general; instead, she illuminates the irremediable difficulty and inescapability of such judgments in a violent and intransigent world.     

Acquiring ownership and the attribution of responsibility

How is ownership established over non-owned things? We suggest that people may view ownership as a kind of credit given to agents responsible for making possession of a non-owned object possible. On this view, judgments about the establishment of ownership depend on attributions of responsibility. We report three experiments showing that people’s judgments about the establishment of ownership are influenced by an agent’s intent and control in bringing about an outcome, factors that also affect attributions of responsibility. These findings demonstrate that people do not just consider who was first to possess an object in judging who owns it, and are broadly consistent with the view that ownership is acquired through labor. The findings also suggest that rather than exclusively being the product of social conventions, judgments about the establishment of ownership over non-owned things also depend on the psychological processes underlying the attribution of responsibility.     

Correlates of Team Success in Higher Education

Summary

An attitude questionnaire was filled out by 75 undergraduates who subsequently evaluated a hypothetical male convict's responses to the same survey—the convict's attitudes being either 10% or 90% similar to each S's own views. Ss then made judgments of the convict's emotional maturity, sense of personal responsibility, and control of violent impulses, as well as how much they would like him as a person and how willing they would be to recommend him for parole. The results indicated that attitudinal similarity to the convict was associated with significantly more positive evaluations of him on each of the five response measures. It was suggested that attitudinal similarity to a convict could be a biasing factor in judgments of whether or not the convict should be paroled.     

What's Wrong with Rex? Hegel on Animal Defect and Individuality

In his Logic, Hegel argues that evaluative judgments are comparisons between the reality of an individual object and the standard for that reality found in the object's own concept. Understood in this way, an object is bad (ugly, etc.) insofar as it fails to be what it is according to its concept. In his recent Life and Action, Michael Thompson has suggested that we can understand various kinds of natural defect (i.e., defects in living things) in a similar way, and that if we do, we can helpfully see intellectual and moral badness—irrationality and vice—as themselves varieties of natural defect. In this paper, I argue that Hegel's position on animal individuality denies the claim that irrationality and vice are forms of natural defect. Hegel's account of the individuality proper to the animal organism in the Philosophy of Nature clearly disallows evaluative judgments about animals and thereby establishes a well‐defined conceptual distinction between natural defect and intellectual or ethical—i.e., broadly spiritual or geistliche—defect. Hegel thus provides a way of maintaining the difference between nature and spirit within his broader commitment to a post‐Kantian conception of substantial form.