Tasks determine what is learned in visual statistical learning

Visual statistical learning (VSL), the unsupervised learning of statistical contingencies across time and space, may play a key role in efficient and predictive encoding of the perceptual world. How VSL capabilities vary as a function of ongoing task demands is still poorly understood. VSL is modulated by selective attention and faces interference from some secondary tasks, but there is little evidence that the types of contingencies learned in VSL are sensitive to task demands. We found a powerful effect of task on what is learned in VSL. Participants first completed a visual familiarization task requiring judgments of face gender (female/male) or scene location (interior/exterior). Statistical regularities were embedded between stimulus pairs. During a surprise recognition phase, participants showed less recognition for pairs that had required a change in response key (e.g., female followed by male) or task (e.g., female followed by indoor) during familiarization. When familiarization required detection of “flicker” or “jiggle” events unrelated to image content, there was weaker, but uniform, VSL across pair types. These results suggest that simple task manipulations play a strong role in modulating the distribution of learning over different pair combinations. Such variations may arise from task and response conflict or because the manner in which images are processed is altered.     

On "On what there is"

All sides in the recent debates over the Quine-Putnam Indispensability thesis presuppose Quine's criterion for determining what a discourse is ontologically committed to. I subject the criterion to scrutiny, especially in regard to the available competitor-criteria, asking what means of evaluation there are for comparing alternative criteria against each other. Finding none, the paper concludes that ontological questions, in a certain sense , are philosophically indeterminate.     

Scanning the "Fringe" of consciousness: what is felt and what is not felt in intuitions about semantic coherence

In intuitions concerning semantic coherence participants are able to discriminate above chance whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent triad) or not (incoherent triad). These intuitions are driven by increased fluency in processing coherent triads compared to incoherent triads, which in turn triggers a brief and short positive affect. The present work investigates which of these internal cues, fluency or positive affect, is the actual cue underlying coherence intuitions. In Experiment 1, participants liked coherent word triads more than incoherent triads, but did not rate them as being more fluent in processing. In Experiment 2, participants could intuitively detect coherence when they misattributed fluency to an external source, but lost this intuitive ability when they misattributed affect. It is concluded that the coherence-induced fluency by itself is not consciously experienced and not used in the coherence intuitions, but the fluency-triggered affective consequences.     

Modeling how, when, and what is learned in a simple fault-finding task

We have developed a process model that learns in multiple ways while finding faults in a simple control panel device. The model predicts human participants' learning through its own learning. The model's performance was systematically compared to human learning data, including the time course and specific sequence of learned behaviors. These comparisons show that the model accounts very well for measures such as problem-solving strategy, the relative difficulty of faults, and average fault-finding time. More important, because the model learns and transfers its learning across problems, it also accounts for the faster problem-solving times due to learning when examined across participants, across faults, and across the series of 20 trials on an individual participant basis. The model shows how learning while problem solving can lead to more recognition-based performance, and helps explain how the shape of the learning curve can arise through learning and be modified by differential transfer. Overall, the quality of the correspondence appears to have arisen from procedural, declarative, and episodic learning all taking place within individual problem-solving episodes.     

The ties that bind what is known to the recognition of what is new

Recognition success varies with how information is encoded (e.g., level of processing) and with what is already known as a result of past learning (e.g., word frequency). This article presents the results of experiments showing that preexisting connections involving the associates of studied words facilitate their recognition regardless of whether the words are intentionally encoded or are incidentally encoded under semantic or nonsemantic conditions. Words are more likely to be recognized when they have either more resonant connections coming back to them from their associates or more connections among their associates. Such results occur even though attention is never drawn to these associates. Regression analyses showed that these connections affect recognition independently of frequency, so the present results add to the literature showing that prior lexical knowledge contributes to episodic recognition. In addition, equations that use free-association data to derive composite strength indices of resonance and connectivity were evaluated. Implications for theories of recognition are discussed.     

The ties that bind what is known to the recall of what is new

Cued recall success varies with what people know and with what they do during an episode. This paper focuses on prior knowledge and disentangles the relative effects of 10 features of words and their relationships on cued recall. Results are reported for correlational and multiple regression analyses of data obtained from free association norms and from 29 experiments. The 10 features were only weakly correlated with each other in the norms and, with notable exceptions, in the experiments. The regression analysis indicated that forward cue-to-target strength explained the most variance, followed by backward target-to-cue strength. Target connectivity and set size explained the next most variance, along with mediated cue-to-target strength. Finally, frequency, concreteness, shared associate strength, and cue set size also contributed significantly to recall. Taken together, indices of prior word knowledge explain 49% of the recall variance. Theoretically driven equations that use free association to predict cued recall were also evaluated. Each equation was designed to condense multiple indices of word interconnectivity into a single predictor.     

释“易，所以会天道人道者也”

《郭店楚简·语丛》"易,所以会天道、人道者也",大概是现存最早和最明确表达"天人合一"思想的命题。《易》的"所以会天道、人道",表明"天"、"人"之间的关系实为一内在关系,二者是不离相即的,而西方哲学则以"外在关系"立论。《周易》是中国最古老探讨"所以会天道、人道"的经典。     

Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: how order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned

Why do adult language learners typically fail to acquire second languages with native proficiency? Does prior linguistic experience influence the size of the “units” adults attend to in learning, and if so, how does this influence what gets learned? Here, we examine these questions in relation to grammatical gender, which adult learners almost invariably struggle to master. We present a model of learning that predicts that exposure to smaller units (such as nouns) before exposure to larger linguistic units (such as sentences) can critically impair learning about predictive relations between units: such as that between a noun and its article. This prediction is then confirmed by a study of adult participants learning grammatical gender in an artificial language. Adults learned both nouns and their articles better when they were first heard nouns used in context with their articles prior to hearing the nouns individually, compared with learners who first heard the nouns in isolation, prior to hearing them used in context. In the light of these results, we discuss the role gender appears to play in language, the importance of meaning in artificial grammar learning, and the implications of this work for the structure of L2-training.     

肿瘤真是基因突变的产物吗--试论肿瘤疾病的本质及其发生发展的共性规律

解释肿瘤发生发展机制的学说很多,归纳起来无外两类,一是基因突变学说,二是细胞外遗传决定学说.突变理论认为肿瘤是细胞遗传物质发生不可逆改变的结果.外遗传决定学说认为肿瘤细胞遗传基因本身没有改变,而只是基因表达异常的结果,在适宜的环境中癌细胞可以再分化.     

A critical role for "affective neuroscience" in resolving what is basic about basic emotions.

Ortony and Turner (1990) asked "What's Basic About Basic Emotions," and they concluded "very little." They proceeded to advocate a "componential" or "mosaic" view of how emotional systems should be analyzed. Their thesis was flawed by their failure to consider the available neurobehavioral data. Genetically dictated brain systems that mediate affective-emotional processes do exist, even though there are bound to be semantic ambiguities in how we speak about these systems. This commentary summarizes key lines of evidence for coherently operating emotional systems in the brain and advocates the position that the issue of basic emotions can no longer be credibly discussed without adequate consideration of the relevant brain research in the area. The type of conceptual, logical analysis pursued by Ortony and Turner, in the absence of a thorough analysis of the available neurological data, is not an adequate basis for resolving what is basic about basic emotions.     

Begging what is at issue in the argument

This paper objects to treating begging the question as circular reasoning. It argues that what is at issue in the argument is not to be confused with the claim or position that the arguer is adopting, and that logicians from Aristotle on give the wrong definition and have difficulty making sense of the fallacy because they try to define it in terms of how an argument is defined by logical theory - as a sequence consisting of premises followed by a conclusion. That the problematic about begging the question depends on treating an argument as a context-less sequence of statements seems to be anticipated by the pragma-dialectical approach. The paper offers a critique of this dialogical approach, as exemplified by Douglas Walton in his recent book on begging the question, on the grounds that it raises more problems than it solves. It concludes with the suggestion that what is really at issue in discussions of begging the question is the need for a theory of fallacy.