Remembering Early Childhood: How Much, How, and Why (or Why Not)

In this article, we consider recent research on three questions about people's memories for their early childhood: whether childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, whether implicit memories survive when explicit memories do not, and why early episodic memories are sketchy. The research leads us to form three conclusions. First, we argue that childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, as long as the term is defined clearly. Specifically, people are able to recall parts of their lives from the period between ages 2 and 5 years, but they recall less from that period than from other periods. Second, we conclude that implicit memories from early childhood may be evident even when explicit memories are not, a finding that suggests early experience may affect behavior in ways that people do not consciously recognize. Third, we argue that although young children are well known to be wonderfully efficient learners of semantic information, they have difficulty in either encoding or retrieving the interlinked aspects of events that lend them their autobiographical character. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories of early childhood may be linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex.     

How U.S. Children and Adolescents Spend Time: What It Does (and Doesn't) Tell Us About Their Development

Young people develop as "the sum of past experiences," and data on their time use are one means of quantifying those experiences. U.S. children and adolescents spend dramatically less time than in the agrarian past in household and income-generating labor. Because such labor is usually repetitive and unchallenging, this reduction has probably not deprived youths of crucial developmental experience. The schoolwork replacing this time has a clearer relationship to developmental outcomes. American teens, however, spend less time on schoolwork than teens in other industrialized countries. American teenagers have more discretionary time, much spent watching television or interacting with friends; spending large amounts of time in these activities is related to negative developmental outcomes. Increasing amounts of young people's discretionary time, however, appear to be spent in structured voluntary activities, like arts, sports, and organizations, which may foster initiative, identity, and other positive developmental outcomes.     

Doctrinal Drift,Dance or Development: How Truth Takes Time in the Life of Communion

In recent ecclesiology, which highlights the value of diversity and dialogue and the difficulty of resolving complex issues, the concept of doctrinal development is sometimes reduced merely to the notion that we cannot be sure of things we once thought we knew. While affirming the need for ecclesial humility and uncertainty, the article insists that a truly questioning church is one that also has hope of arriving, eventually, at answers to history's new questions. Passages from Scripture, Augustine and J.H. Newman are used to show that in recent ecclesiological statements of the Anglican Primates, the World Council of Churches and the Catholic theologian Stan Chu Ilo commenting on the 2014–15 Synods on the Family, an imbalanced vision of a church of only questions – prone to doctrinal drift or ‘dance’ – has supplanted a proper vision of a church of both questions and answers, in which authentic development of doctrine is possible.     

What Does (Not) Count as Violence: On the State of Recent Debates About the Inner Connection Between Language and Violence

This paper raises the question whether language and violence are internally connected. It starts from the experience of violence and from its theoretical interpretation as violence in the context of political forms of life which are challenged by complaints about violence. Such forms of life have to confront this issue because they are supposed to be responsive to claims and demands of others who articulate violence as an experience of violation. Whether a kind of responsive ethos may be based on the suspected inner connection between language and violence is being discussed at the end.     

Bootstrapping while barefoot (crime models vs. theoretical models in the hunt for serial killers)

Investigating random homicides involves constructing models of an odd sort. While the differences between these models and scientific models are radical, calling them models is justified both by functional and structural similarities. Serial homicide investigations illustrate the marked difference between theoretical models in science and the models applied in these criminal investigations. This is further illustrated by considering Glymourian bootstrapping in attempts to solve such homicides. The solutions that result differ radically from explanations in science that are confirmed or disconfirmed by occurrences. Unlike the scientist, the flatfoot gumshoe is also barefoot: he is bereft of a general, determinative theoretical frame. This result shows that criminal investigations do not apply science in the Galilean sense.I wish to thank philosophers Keith Cooper, William Wimsatt, and, especially, Jay Bachrach for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.     

The Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA): Internal Consistency (Q1 vs. Q2 and Q3 vs. Q4) in Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

The internal consistency of the Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA) was examined in a cohort of 6- to 12-year-old children (N = 63) strictly diagnosed with ADHD. The internal consistency of errors of omission (OMM), errors of commission (COM), response time (RT), and response time variability (RTV) of different test conditions (stimulus infrequent condition [Q₁ vs. Q₂] and stimulus frequent condition [Q₃ vs. Q₄]) was assessed via correlation analyses. All TOVA index scores under investigation assessing its internal consistency exhibited statistically significant correlations. All correlations fell in the moderate-high range.     

Preference for Human (vs. Robotic) Labor is Stronger in Symbolic Consumption Contexts

Advances in robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence increasingly enable firms to replace human labor with technology, thereby fundamentally transforming how goods and services are produced. From both managerial and societal points of view, it is therefore important to understand demand‐side incentives for firms to employ human labor. We begin to address this question by examining for which products and services consumers are more likely to favor human (vs. robotic) labor. In six studies, we demonstrate that consumers prefer human (vs. robotic) labor more for products with higher (vs. lower) symbolic value (e.g., when expressing something about one's beliefs and personality is of greater importance). We theorize that this is because consumers have stronger uniqueness motives in more (vs. less) symbolic consumption contexts (and associate human labor more strongly with product uniqueness). In line with this account, we demonstrate that individual differences in need for uniqueness moderate the interaction between production mode and symbolic motives and that a measure of uniqueness motives mediates the effect of consumption context on preferences for human (vs. robotic) production.