What Is Trust?

Trust is difficult to define. Instead of doing so, I propose that the best way to understand the concept is through a genealogical account. I show how a root notion of trust arises out of some basic features of what it is for humans to live socially, in which we rely on others to act cooperatively. I explore how this concept acquires resonances of hope and threat, and how we analogically apply this in related but different contexts. The genealogical account explains both why the notion has such value for us and why it is difficult to define.     

Scene and Object Vision in Rats

Dark Agouti rats learned to discriminate large visual displays ('scenes') in a computercontrolled Y-maze. Each scene comprised several shapes ('objects') against a contrasting background. The constant-negative paradigm was used; in each problem, one constant scene was presented on every trial together with a trial-unique variable scene, and rats were rewarded for approaching the variable scene. By varying the manner in which variables differed from the constant, we investigated what aspects of scenes and the objects comprising them were salient. In Experiment 1, rats discriminated constant scenes more easily if they contained four objects rather than six, and they showed a slight attentional bias towards the lower halves of the screens. That bias disappeared in Experiment 2. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that rats could discriminate scenes even if the objects that comprised them were closely matched in position, luminance, and area. Therefore, they encoded the form of individual objects. Rats perceived shapes of the same class (e.g. two ellipses) as more similar than shapes from different classes (e.g. ellipse and polygon) regardless of whether they also differed in area. This paradigm is suitable for studying the neuropsychology of perceiving spatial relationships in multi-object scenes and of identifying visual objects.     

The big shill

Shills are people who endorse products and companies for pay, while pretending that their endorsements are ingenuous. Here we argue that there is something objectionable about shilling that is not reducible to its bad consequences, the lack of epistemic conscientiousness it often relies upon, or to the shill's insincerity. Indeed, we take it as a premise of our inquiry that shilling can sometimes be sincere, and that its wrongfulness is not mitigated by the shill's sincerity, in cases where the shill is sincere. Our proposal is that the shill's defining characteristic is their knowingly engaging in a kind of speech that obscures a certain aspect of its social status—most commonly, by pretending to speak on their own personal behalf, while in fact speaking as an employee—and that this sort of behaviour is objectionable irrespective of any other features of the shill's conduct. This sort of obfuscation undermines a socially beneficial communicative custom, in which we conscientiously mark the distinction between personal speech and speech-for-hire.     

The Influence of Presentation Format of Story on Narrative Production in Chinese Children Learning English-as-a-Second-Language: A Comparison Between Graphic Novel,Illustration Book and Text

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Past studies have shown that multimodal presentation of story can improve story-retelling performance in the first language. The purpose of the present study...