Temporally Incongruent Counterparts

Despite its first page this paper is not yet another piece on Kant! Rather, the paper is a contribution to the literature on incongruent counterparts. Specifically, it concerns the question of whether we can construct a temporal version of the puzzle of incongruent counterparts—a question which (as far as 1 can tell) has been thoroughly neglected. I maintain that we can construct such a version of the puzzle, and that this temporal variant on the phenomenon has something to teach us about popular arguments for the possibility (or even actuality) of four-dimensional space.     

Temporally nonadjacent nonlinguistic sounds affect speech categorization

Speech perception is an ecologically important example of the highly context-dependent nature of perception; adjacent speech, and even nonspeech, sounds influence how listeners categorize speech. Some theories emphasize linguistic or articulation-based processes in speech-elicited context effects and peripheral (cochlear) auditory perceptual interactions in non-speech-elicited context effects. The present studies challenge this division. Results of three experiments indicate that acoustic histories composed of sine-wave tones drawn from spectral distributions with different mean frequencies robustly affect speech categorization. These context effects were observed even when the acoustic context temporally adjacent to the speech stimulus was held constant and when more than a second of silence or multiple intervening sounds separated the nonlinguistic acoustic context and speech targets. These experiments indicate that speech categorization is sensitive to statistical distributions of spectral information, even if the distributions are composed of nonlinguistic elements. Acoustic context need be neither linguistic nor local to influence speech perception.     

Temporally unfolding neural representation of pictorial occlusion

The human visual system possesses a remarkable ability to reconstruct the shape of an object that is partly occluded by an interposed surface. Behavioral results suggest that, under some circumstances, this perceptual process (termed amodal completion) progresses from an initial representation of local image features to a completed representation of a shape that may include features that are not explicitly present in the retinal image. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that the completed surface is represented in early visual cortical areas. We used fMRI adaptation, combined with brief, masked exposures, to track the amodal completion process as it unfolds in early visual cortical regions. We report evidence for an evolution of the neural representation from the image-based feature representation to the completed representation. Our method offers the possibility of measuring changes in cortical activity using fMRI over a time scale of a few hundred milliseconds.     

Realism about laws

This paper explores the idea that laws express relationships between properties or universals as defended in Michael Tooley's recent book Causation: A Realist Approach. I suggest that the most plausible version of realism will take a different form than that advocated by Tooley. According to this alternative, laws are grounded in facts about the capacities and powers of particular systems, rather than facts about relations between universals. The notion of lawfulness is linked to the notion of invariance, rather than to the metaphysical notion of a necessary connection.     

Excitation Transfer Effects Between Semantically Related and Temporally Adjacent Stimuli

Although excitation transfer theory has been supported in numerous contexts, questions remain regarding transfer of arousal between events that are semantically and temporally related. This article summarizes two studies exploring excitation transfer between such events: sequential plays from a college football game. Study 1 failed to support the theory, instead suggesting contrast effects between stimuli. A follow-up study, which altered the method and incorporated psychophysiological measures, demonstrated that arousal may transfer between semantically related, temporally adjacent events. We suggest implications for the theory vis-à-vis misattribution of arousal, as well as opportunities to expand the application of excitation transfer.     

Catching oriented objects

We have investigated how participants match the orientation of a line, which moves on a vertical screen towards the subject. On its path to the participant, the line could disappear at several positions. Participants were instructed to put a bar on a predefined interception point on the screen, such that the bar touched the screen with the same orientation as the moving line at the very moment when the line passed through the interception point or (in case of line disappearance) when the hidden line would pass through the interception point (like in catching). Participants made significant errors for oblique orientations, but not for vertical and horizontal orientations of the moving line. These errors were small or absent when the moving line was visible all the way along its path on the screen. However, these errors became larger when the line disappeared farther away from the interception point. In the second experiment we tested whether these errors could be related to errors in visual perception of line orientation. The results demonstrate that errors in matching of the bar do not correspond to the last perceived orientation of the line, but rather to the perceived orientation of the moving line near the beginning of the movement path. This corresponds to earlier observations that participants shortly track a moving target and then make a saccadic eye movement to the interception point.     

Perceptually oriented hypnosis

This theoretical article explores postulates representative of a perceptual frame of reference for a better understanding of hypnotic experiencing. This author contends that Perceptual Psychology, a theory first conceptualized by Snygg and Combs, as revised by Combs, Richards, and Richards in 1988, and Perceptually Oriented Hypnosis provide an effective way of understanding hypnosis, the therapist-client relationship, and has some implications as well for better comprehending psychopathology. Perceptually oriented hypnotic principles are shown to enhance the characeristics of the adequate personality, expand the phenomenal field, change personal meanings, and change aspects of the phenomenal self in the context of hypnosis. Implications for understanding differing views and conflicting perceptions of reality held by scientists and researchers are discussed. Implications for Dissociative Identity Disorder are also addressed. Research utilizing Giorgi's research methodology and Wasicsko's qualitative procedure for assessing educators' dispositions is suggested.     

Temporally selective attention modulates early perceptual processing: event-related potential evidence

Some of the most important information we encounter changes so rapidly that our perceptual systems cannot process all of it in detail. Spatially selective attention is critical for perception when more information than can be processed in detail is presented simultaneously at distinct locations. When presented with complex, rapidly changing information, listeners may need to selectively attend to specific times rather than to locations. We present evidence that listeners can direct selective attention to time points that differ by as little as 500 msec, and that doing so improves target detection, affects baseline neural activity preceding stimulus presentation, and modulates auditory evoked potentials at a perceptually early stage. These data demonstrate that attentional modulation of early perceptual processing is temporally precise and that listeners can flexibly allocate temporally selective attention over short intervals, making it a viable mechanism for preferentially processing the most relevant segments in rapidly changing streams.     

样例在理解时间相关事件中的作用

该文的两个实验探讨了人们理解自己和熟悉的人物日常惯例事件的方式。实验1在中文条件下验证了Coleombe等（2002）的研究,即人们不利用已经形成的原型去理解和袁征自己或熟悉人物的日常惯例事件;实验2证明了出现这一结果是因为人们在理解这些事件时利用了过去生活中与当前描述相同的具体样例。实验2还发现,即使不存在上述样例,被试仍然没有启用相关的原型。     

Temporally massed CS presentations generate more fear extinction than spaced presentations

Rodent fear conditioning models both excitatory learning and the pathogenesis of human anxiety, whereas extinction of conditional fear is a paradigm of inhibitory learning and the explicit model for behavior therapy. Many studies support a general learning rule for acquisition: Temporally spaced training is more effective than massed training. The authors asked whether this rule applies to extinction of conditional fear in mice. The authors find that both short- and long-term fear extinction are greater with temporally massed presentations of the conditional stimulus (CS). The data also indicate that once CS presentations are sufficiently massed to initiate, or "induce," extinction learning, further CS presentations are more effective when spaced.     

The laws of modality

Philosophical Studies - Nomic realists have traditionally put laws to work within a theory of natural modality, in order to provide a metaphysical source for causal necessitation, counterfactuals,...     

laws and their stability

Many philosophers have believed that the laws of nature differ from the accidental truths in their invariance under counterfactual perturbations. Roughly speaking, the laws would still have held had q been the case, for any q that is consistent with the laws. (Trivially, no accident would still have held under every such counterfactual supposition.) The main problem with this slogan (even if it is true) is that it uses the laws themselves to delimit qs range. I present a means of distinguishing the laws (and their logical consequences) from the accidents, in terms of their range of invariance under counterfactual antecedents, that does not appeal to physical modalities (or any cognate notion) in delimiting the relevant range of counterfactual perturbations. I then argue that this approach explicates the sense in which the laws possess a kind of necessity.