Eye movements reveal sustained implicit processing of others' mental states

The ability to attribute mental states to others is crucial for social competency. To assess mentalizing abilities, in false-belief tasks participants attempt to identify an actor's belief about an object's location as opposed to the object's actual location. Passing this test on explicit measures is typically achieved by 4 years of age, but recent eye movement studies reveal registration of others' beliefs by 7 to 15 months. Consequently, a 2-path mentalizing system has been proposed, consisting of a late developing, cognitively demanding component and an early developing, implicit/automatic component. To date, investigations on the implicit system have been based on single-trial experiments only or have not examined how it operates across time. In addition, no study has examined the extent to which participants are conscious of the belief states of others during these tasks. Thus, the existence of a distinct implicit mentalizing system is yet to be demonstrated definitively. Here we show that adults engaged in a primary unrelated task display eye movement patterns consistent with mental state attributions across a sustained temporal period. Debriefing supported the hypothesis that this mentalizing was implicit. It appears there indeed exists a distinct implicit mental state attribution system.     

Making an Art of Creativity: The Cognitive Science of Duchamp and Dada

Dada is the infant terrible of art history, an anarchic movement that is typically referred to as nihilistic, pathological, and firmly enshrined within the modernist paradigm and the context of WWI. Through the lens of classical, romantic, and psychoanalytic notions, it certainly appears almost antithetical to creativity. Yet from a cognitive point-of-view, Dada marks a watershed in the understanding of creativity, and articulates principles of creative cognition with surprising insight and precision many decades ahead of science.     

Alternative motivation: a new challenge to moral judgment internalism

Internalists argue that there is a necessary connection between motivation and moral judgment. The examination of cases plays an important role in philosophical debate about internalism. This debate has focused on cases concerning the failure to act in accordance with a moral judgment, for one reason or another. I call these failure cases. I argue that a different sort of case is also relevant to this debate. This sort of case is characterized by (1) moral judgment and (2) behavior that accords with the content of the moral judgment but that has been performed not because of the moral judgment. Instead it is due to some other source of motivation. I call these alternative motivation cases. I distinguish two sorts of alternative motivation cases, and I argue that externalists have natural explanations of these cases. By contrast, extant internalist accounts of failure cases are inadequate when applied to alternative motivation cases.     

Why a Big Mac Is a Good Mac: Associations between Affect and Size

Evaluation is a core topic of interest in both social psychology and linguistic theory, but there are relatively few social-cognitive studies examining the “online” consequences of affective metaphor. The experiments presented here sought to investigate such online consequences in relation to an understudied class of metaphors linking evaluation to size (i.e., “bigger is better”). Consistent with such metaphors, we found that positive (vs. negative) words were evaluated more quickly (Experiment 1) and accurately (Experiment 2) when presented in a larger (vs. smaller) font size. Parallel and opposite effects were found for negative words. A third experiment demonstrated that words presented in a larger font size were evaluated more favorably, thus extending size effects to evaluative judgments. Together, the studies converge on the importance of size metaphors for understanding evaluation from a social-cognitive perspective.     

Benchmarking key service quality indicators in UK Employee Assistance Programme Counselling: A CORE System data profile

Background: Levels of psychological distress appear to be increasing in the workplace, in parallel with the growth of employee assistance programme (EAP) provision offering a range of talking treatments. However, such growth takes place in the absence of a substantive body of supporting research evidence despite a quarter of a decade of research activity. Aims: To analyse a national sample of EAP data and profile relative service quality on a set of key service indicators. Method: CORE System data profiles of over 28,000 clients were voluntarily donated by six EAP service providers. An established benchmarking methodology was used to assess the relative quality of EAP service provision compared with published CORE System benchmarks for NHS primary care and UK higher education student counselling services. Results: High quality data profiled an EAP service clientele who were quantifiably distressed, accessed treatment quickly, with the majority completing treatment and demonstrating high rates of recovery and/or improvement relative to published benchmarks from the NHS and HE comparative sectors. Limitations of the study and implications for practice and further investigation are considered.     

The Ontic and the Ontological in Heidegger's Philosophy of Technology: Response to Thomson

Iain Thomson's critique is persuasive on several points but not on the major issue, the relation of the ontological to the ontic in Heidegger's philosophy of technology. This reply attempts to show that these two dimensions of Heidegger's theory are closely related, at least in the technological domain, and not separate, as Thomson affirms. It is argued that Heidegger's evaluations of particular technologies, the flaws of which Thomson concedes, proceed from a flawed ontological conception.     

Social Determinants of HIV Among Men Who Have Sex with Men in Cape Town

Little is known about how social factors influence vulnerability to, and consequences of, HIV infection among men who have sex with men (MSM) in South Africa. This study aimed to analyse social stratification and its links with HIV among MSM in Cape Town, South Africa. Six interviews and six focus group discussions (n = 25) were conducted. Tools were based on the World Health Organisation’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health framework. Directed content analysis was used to analyse data. Race and education were directly linked to social position. MSM from lower social positions were more vulnerable to HIV, and had more negative consequences of HIV infection, compared to wealthier MSM. Engagement with community leaders, health workers and police to promote inclusion could reduce vulnerability of MSM to HIV. Increased access to free, non-discriminatory HIV-related services would reduce inequities in access to HIV services by MSM.     

Different methods of lexical access for words presented in the left and right visual hemifields

Right-handed adults were asked to identify by name bilaterally presented words and pronounceable nonwords. For words in the normal horizontal format, word length (number of letters) affected left visual hemifield (LVF) but not right visual hemifield (RVF) performance in Experiments 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. This finding was made for words of high and low frequency (Experiment 6) and imageability (Experiment 5). It also held across markedly different levels of overall performance (Experiments 1 and 2), and across different relative positionings of short and long words in the LVF and RVF (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 demonstrated that the variable affecting LVF performance is the number of letters in a word, not its phonological length. For pronounceable nonwords (Experiment 7) and words in unusual formats (Experiment 8), however, length affected both LVF and RVF performance. The characteristics identified for RVF performance in these experiments also hold for the normal reading system. In this (normal) system the absence of length effects for horizontally formatted words is generally taken to reflect the processes involved in lexical access. Length effects in the normal reading system are thought to arise when lexical access for unusually formatted words and for the pronunciation of nonwords requires the short-term storage of information at a graphemic level of analysis. The characteristics of LVF performance indicate that horizontally formatted words presented to the right cerebral hemisphere can only achieve lexical access by a method that requires the short-term storage of graphemic information. This qualitative difference in methods of lexical access applies regardless of whether the right hemisphere is seen as accessing words in the left hemisphere's lexicon or words in a lexicon of its own.