Implicit theories and context in personal recollection: Romanians' recall of their political and economic past

Ross argued that people employ implicit theories of stability and change as they remember previously held attitudes or prior states of affairs. He acknowledged that the application of these theories is conditional, but does not explore what these conditions might be. We examine here whether implicit theories are context‐sensitive, that is, whether implicit theories that apply when present and past contexts are similar also apply when the present and past contexts differ. The issue is explored by looking at Romanians' memory for previously held political opinions and prior prices for common and uncommon products. The results suggest that memory for prices is sensitive to changes in the political – economic environment, but memory for political opinions is not. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotional influences on perception and working memory

Although there has been steady progress elucidating the influence of emotion on cognition, it remains unclear precisely when and why emotion impairs or facilitates cognition. The present study investigated the mechanisms involved in the influence of emotion on perception and working memory (WM), using modified 0-back and 2-back tasks, respectively. First, results showed that attentional focus modulated the impact of emotion on perception. Specifically, emotion facilitated perceptual task performance when it was relevant to the task, but it impaired performance when it was irrelevant to the task. The differential behavioural effect of emotion on perception as a function of attentional focus diminished under high WM load. Second, attentional focus did not directly modulate the impact of emotion on WM, but rather its influence depended on the dynamic relationship between internal representations. Specifically, WM performance was worse when the material already being held online and the new input were of matching emotions (e.g. both were negative), compared to when they were not. We propose that the competition between “bottom-up” and “top-down” processing for limited cognitive resources explains the nature of the influence of emotion on both perception and WM.     

Age-related cognitive decline as a function of daytime testing

The current study investigates the effects of age, cognitive load, optimal time-of-day testing, and irrelevant background noise suppression on mental processing. One hundred and seventy-eight young (M = 22.97 years) and 114 old adults (M = 56.38 years) were assessed for implicit learning and speed of information processing under irrelevant sound interference early during daytime (7AM–2.30PM) or in the afternoons (3PM–midnight). No direct effect of irrelevant speech effect was found on implicit learning. An optimal time of testing per age group was identified according to the ability to suppress irrelevant auditory information. If no semantic meaning was derived from the sound conditions, irrelevant sound was easily inhibited leaving no room for declined cognitive performance. This suggests an intact phonological inhibition in older adults and a further circumvention of the phonological loop. However, when difficulty was increased, a widened performance gap between young and old people could be observed. Education modulated difficult performance irrespective of age. With increasing age, task demand fulfillment becomes a function of a limited time mechanism. If extraneous time is not adapted to cognitive skills and performance, higher order processing cannot be reached, rendering older adults slower than their younger counterparts.     

A Topological Approach to Full Belief

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Stalnaker (Philosophical Studies, 128(1), 169–199 2006) introduced a combined epistemic-doxastic logic that can formally express a strong concept of belief, a...     

Assessing Non-intrinsic Limitarianism

Philosophia - In this paper we aim to examine a novel view on distributive justice, i.e. limitarianism, which claims that it is morally impermissible to be rich. Our main goal is to assess the two...     

Electoral Quid Pro Quo: A Defence of Barter Markets in Votes

In this article I aim to provide the first normative discussion of barter voting markets, namely markets which allow the trading of votes on issues/elections for votes on other issues/elections. The article is framed within the wider literature on the legal permissibility of vote buying, with a particular focus on the recent debate between Christopher Freiman and James Stacey Taylor. I argue that while Taylor's objections successfully defeat Freiman's case in favour of standard voting markets, they are unable to also defeat the type of voting markets outlined here. Furthermore, I argue that there are at least two plausible prima facie reasons in favour of barter voting markets, grounded in their capacity to contribute to the alleviation of injustice for systematically disadvantaged socio‐economic groups and to their capacity to reduce one form of bad voting, i.e. voting from ignorance.